Uniti Range USB interfaces - are HFS+ formatted drives supported?

...and secondarily, I may be wrong but thought I saw something suggesting NAIM gear wasn't best suited to FLAC decoding (may be wrong) so if I have the choice of download formats from Qobuz would I be best with AIFF/WAV/WMA/FLAC/ALAC lossless options?

Hi Alley Cat, re your secondary post.   I think it's generally agreed Naim sounds best playing WAV.     I download WAV when it's available, otherwise I take whatever is on offer & convert to WAV with dBpoweramp.   Others download & store in FLAC as its can be compressed & saves disc space & also is easier to edit metadata - not that WAV has problems - then set the NAS to transcode the FLAC to WAV for replay.     Others go for AIFF or ALAC - the Apple formats,  these can be transcoded as well.   WMA in its various forms of lossless & lossy is not normally used.

Thanks for the advice Mike-B, you'd think in theory it wouldn't matter which lossless format was being played, but I cn imagine there may be reasons why it would.

Apple to my mind have been vey backward promoting their ALAC lossless format.  I'd be reluctant to use WMA for a variety of reasons.

WAV/AIFF are more conventional perhaps.

Fortunately Qobuz allow a variety of download formats/options, I'd just prefer to concentrate on getting the formats that are perceived to be most musical even if they're not on paper!

Mike

I am using an external hard drive with my Uniti Atom, to act as a UPnP server, formatted on a Mac Mini to use HFS+.

There was initially some confusion as the Atom on-line "manual" incorrectly said that only FAT32 was supported but this contradicted the Atom specification as then published. Not sure why, but this part of the specification no longer seems to be there, even if selecting full specification on the Atom fancy web site.

Roger

HI again Alley Cat,   yes in theory it shouldn't make any difference,  the forum rumour is that Naim streamers were developed around WAV.  How true this is I don't know but when I first started streaming I found I prefered my NDX on WAV over FLAC & I trust my own Mk-II audio receptors over rumours.     I also found my NAS UPnP media server had difficulty transcoding gapless so I chose WAV t overcome that & have stuck to that.  If the download vendors don't have WAV, I convert whatever they have to WAV,  remarkably simple with dBpoweramp.   I read post's of how WAV has issues with metadata & editing, none of which I have ever found in practice.  So for me WAV is here to stay.

Hi Noname,  I am not at all familiar with Naim's new platform details so can't really comment.

Mike

Hi Noname,  I am not at all familiar with Naim's new platform details so can't really comment.

Thanks but I was not expecting a comment. I was just responding to your query about HFS+ support with information on the Atom which is certainly part of the Uniti range.

My original Uniti (fully upgraded) only supports FAT32, as you would expect.

Roger

Mike, Alley Cat

My Apologies - I was responding to Mike instead of Alley Cat.

Regards

Roger

Thank All for the replies - good to know HFS+ works currently at least!

Mike-B - thanks for the info about the WAV 'rumour' I've tended to download FLAC and ALAC in the past, but Qobuz should let me download the WAV version too so I can A/B various formats.  Certainly makes sense to me that skipping decompression might have some subtle effects on the whole process and with storage sizes/costs these days it's not an issue to use uncompressed vs compressed lossless formats.

Hi again Alley Cat,  yup it would be good to form your own opinion re the A/B differences,  but especially so with the formats on your own NAS & UPnP software.    Question:  don't you have dBpoweramp ??? as with that you can convert to/from all the codecs without faffing with another Qobuz download.   When I did my testing I took copies of just a few selected tracks & made a test 'album' of each track running in WAV, FLAC & AIFF order.  That way I could just sit back & let it run through the tracks without doing anything - i.e. without opening eyes or getting off my fat ......     I then set the NAS to transcode & hear how that sounded in comparison.      Enough to say I chose to use WAV,  but that was using Synology's native Media Server.  I believe you might find different results (& opinions) with other NAS & media server software.

Alley Cat posted:

Thank All for the replies - good to know HFS+ works currently at least!

Mike-B - thanks for the info about the WAV 'rumour' I've tended to download FLAC and ALAC in the past, but Qobuz should let me download the WAV version too so I can A/B various formats.  Certainly makes sense to me that skipping decompression might have some subtle effects on the whole process and with storage sizes/costs these days it's not an issue to use uncompressed vs compressed lossless formats.

I think the traditional suspicion was that if the streamer had to unpack the FLAC at the same time as processing it into an analogue signal that could be played, then you could hear the effect of all of that processing. So not an error, even a subtle error, in decompressing the lossless file, just that the processor had to work harder and you would hear the downside of that..

Whether this is still true with the new Unitis is moot, since they have a whole lot more processing power available to them. So if you did try the suggested experiment, there would be a lot of interest in your findings.

best

David