Alexa integration? Streamers obsolete even before release?

Why specifically Alexa Integration, should it not also be Siri, Cortana and Google.

Until the current chaos is sorted out, I don't think Naim can afford to devote the necessary time to the firmware to integrate into all the systems, let alone throw enough funds at each of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google to persuade them to do the work necessary at their end to support the Naim steamers.

Out of interest, does your household ask Alexa (saying please), or issue orders? Given the general decline in manners and politeness I have long advocated that Alexa should be programmed to ask: “What’s the magic word?” when “please” is omitted. 

On a practical note, requesting a particular piece of music is great if you know exactly what you want to play, but I find quite often I do it the other way round, browsing to find something that I fancy, and getting Alexa to do it by saying “How about xxx? Yyy? Zzz? Qqq? Rrr? Sss? etc  would be a lot slower, not to mention noisy (and so impossible while listening to the previous piece) 

I read in my paper last week that Apple want to corner the market with the SQ of their offering.

I am personally not so interested in having all the Bells and Whistles on the new streamers. I just want them to sound so good that they surpass the competition. 

Can Alexa not be programmed to send music to a UPnP renderer?  

MangoMonkey posted:

Just a sign that the naim streamers are already outdated, even before they're released.

Google Mini/Alexa has become fairly popular in our household. My son asks Alexa to play music  - even I find it way refreshing to just ask it to play the music I want, rather than grabbing my phone and scrolling/searching. Sometimes there are spirited shouting matches as he shouts over me to ask it to play his selection.

@Richard Dane - Is Alexa integration coming in the new devices?

Maybe a Dac that can deal with endless amounts of Jitter is really the way to go. The streamers are obsolete even before they are released. :-(

do we really need to always go in the fashion direction, like airplay, bluetooth, alexa....or roon.

I prefer naim streamers to be focalised on sound quality first , rather than a lot of fashion tweaks for teenagers.

That would be the HDX with a spdif/usb  input. :-)

@French Rooster - My point is exactly what you're  making. Since all these 'fashionable tech' comes and goes so quickly, there's no point in even being in that space.

Like I said, I'd rather have a solid Dac, impervious to jitter, that can handle any fashionable digital transport thrown at it. 

Naim Dac, I guess, made that promise - too bad no development happened in that space - and it also used to get better, the better transport you threw at it.

UQ2 (as a streamer) into Naim Dac/555 should be a great system.

Too bad the Uniti Atom doesn't have a digital out.

Listening to music is an event for me, it's not some casual pastime.  No thanks Alexa!

????

I've been using Alexa with my Sonos speakers for a few months now.  Sometimes it is wonderful - I can control my music regardless of what I am doing and without having to reach for my phone.  But it is far from perfect.  Sonos and Alexa will work with Spotify, Amazon Music and TuneIn but that is about it in the UK.  Want to play your own music library via Alexa then first you have to upload it to Amazon's own servers.  A move that I doubt would be too popular around here (although if you had to upload it to Naim's own servers perhaps that would be more palatable).  Naim's streamers use uPnP (which is not core functionality for Sonos) and this might resolve barriers to playing your local music library via Alexa.

The other problem with Alexa is that all too often using it is a bit like a 1980s text based adventure game in that it will do what you want but only if you say exactly the right thing.  "Alexa, play the album Your Funeral My Trial by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on kitchen" will produce the result I want.  However miss out any one component and Alexa gets confused.  Miss the word "album" and she plays the track of the same name.  Only ask for "Nick Cave" - that's a different artist (according to Alexa) who never recorded that album (again according to Alexa).  Miss out "on kitchen" and the music starts playing out of the tinny Echo Dot speaker.

Also, being brutally honest, can we all remember exactly what the album names and track names of our favourite music are without the aide memoire of our record collections or music library (and the word "exactly" is key here - Alexa does like people to be accurate and to speak clearly)?  All too often I want to ask for "the latest album" or "you know ... the one with the candle on the cover ... the good one" or some such but this just does not work.

Most of the time I find myself just asking Alexa to play music by a particular artist.  For this sort of casual listening it is just fine.

These problems are all solvable and given time and effort will be solved.  When they are solved and when the right voice control platform presents itself then no doubt Naim will makes its move.

No interest in Alexa, Siri, or any of the talking computers...... do not need any monies spent on R&D for the integration of any of the talking heads to be built in to the NAIM or any hi-fi products......

JMHO.......

While the idea of something at home that can be set to have a female voice and actually listen to what I ask is (very) appealing, I don't want talking in serious listening sessions.

Hypothetical integration aside, if you have multiple sources including hands on ones like vinyl or non remote boxes, partial integration with just the streamer would be as good as no integration. I don't think a single hifi manufacturer has anything to worry about.

People who use Alexa for their hifi control point are probably as happy using iPod docks (2000's) and micro systems (1990's), and ghetto blasters (1980's), i,e, they are not lost customers. They were never viable customers in the first place.

I guess the point I was making was totally missed. From my perspective, all the bullet-point features that the newer streamers (as well as the uniti stuff) are just not that interesting from a high end hifi perspective.

I would rather have 'timeless' tech isolated from fast moving tech. (Given, nothing is truly timeless, tech moves on etc. etc.). 

Alexa was just one example of the fast moving tech landscape. Roon is similar. I would prefer to have tech that moves fast isolated from tech that moves more slowly - or modularized.

Fast moving tech (streamer/spotify/tidal etc. integration) is perhaps best relegated to a device like the UQ that has a digital out. 

The more interesting question would be how to have these various devices adhere to the master clock in the dac...

Hence the comment about the new streamers already obsolete. They were trying to play catchup - by now having newer features (apple airplay, roon, chromecast etc.). These features are just not that interesting - and alexa integration is just one more bullet point - a feature that is at the same level of gimmeckry as the other stuff I mentioned.

Anyway, enough said - I just don't see one buying a NDS or ND555 level piece of equipment every 5 years. At those price-points, (like the 552, 500), these are pieces of equipment you buy for a lifetime. 

Suddently, the Chord Dacs become a lot more appealing. :-) 

You are not wrong at all [@mention:17757776930523932]. And for those of us (and there are many) who basically subscribe to no online services and just use a streamer to play from a NAS of our ripped/downloaded content, the new streamers offer nothing in terms of useful functionality over the existing ones.

You could add a whole host of functional bullet points and as long as they still do UPnP to a NAS, those new features are likely to remain unused even once. The justification in cost, therefore, for many of us is about sound quality only and the feature list can be utterly ignored.

But this is true sadly for all maturing products in tech. 99% of the customers want 1% of the plain vanilla functions. But invariably, much effort is put into developing the other 99% of features for a noisy 1% of customers. Yet all customers have to carry the burden of complexity and cost for those unwanted features. I don't think the ratio is quite as bad as 1:99 (which would be very accurate for enterprise software) with Naim streamers. It is probably more like 20:80.

What can I say? The world is made up of box tickers. To some degree you satisfy them or die. Just look at that long thread about the new streamers and the endless nitpicking about features they do or don't have that most people don't give a s**t about.

Right now I use a streamer that allows me to access the music that I own residing on my NAS and the ability to access a service like TIDAL to access music I do not own at this time. It does not have to go beyond that capability for me. I enjoy the ROVI notes that appear with the albums on the NAS as well as the information furnished by TIDAL. Like reading the liner notes on a CD. 

I do not use Siri on my iPhone and do not want any human to machine voice interaction when driving down the road, ordering a pair of jeans at the store, or selecting an album to play. Just personal preferences.......

MangoMonkey posted:

Anyway, enough said - I just don't see one buying a NDS or ND555 level piece of equipment every 5 years. At those price-points, (like the 552, 500), these are pieces of equipment you buy for a lifetime. 

 

Suddently, the Chord Dacs become a lot more appealing. :-) 

100%.  

I think gear like the 500 series, are very much one-off endgame devices, once bought don’t even bother watching what the manufacturer might replace them with, keep them till they expire, hoping that is decades. I include the NDS in that category - and the Chord Dave DAC.

MangoMonkey posted:

I guess the point I was making was totally missed. From my perspective, all the bullet-point features that the newer streamers (as well as the uniti stuff) are just not that interesting from a high end hifi perspective.

I would rather have 'timeless' tech isolated from fast moving tech. (Given, nothing is truly timeless, tech moves on etc. etc.). 

Alexa was just one example of the fast moving tech landscape. Roon is similar. I would prefer to have tech that moves fast isolated from tech that moves more slowly - or modularized.

Fast moving tech (streamer/spotify/tidal etc. integration) is perhaps best relegated to a device like the UQ that has a digital out. 

The more interesting question would be how to have these various devices adhere to the master clock in the dac...

Hence the comment about the new streamers already obsolete. They were trying to play catchup - by now having newer features (apple airplay, roon, chromecast etc.). These features are just not that interesting - and alexa integration is just one more bullet point - a feature that is at the same level of gimmeckry as the other stuff I mentioned.

Anyway, enough said - I just don't see one buying a NDS or ND555 level piece of equipment every 5 years. At those price-points, (like the 552, 500), these are pieces of equipment you buy for a lifetime. 

 

Suddently, the Chord Dacs become a lot more appealing. :-) 

Ok getting it. You have a point. These type of pricepoints you buy for a lifetime. So you want it to be up to date and not always catching up. This would mean that like with some other devices upgradeability also would need to come from software upgrades or interchangeable boards like with Linn. Let’s see how the story unfolds and how long a ND555 will remain a good value option.

For those dismissive of Alexa/Siri etc. integration, you may change your tune if you were unlucky enough to find yourself suffering an infirmity. At the moment I can control volume, source and mute using Alexa via my Harmony Ultimate remote, which comes in very handy at times. Still early days for the technology, but it's coming folks!

It’s a bit like driverless cars seems totally pointless to me now.....but my parents and Inlaws would probably see them as agame changer in terms of extending their mobility.

This is the very reason why I use a Fully Loaded Raspberry Pi. I cannot bring myself to spend much money on streaming devices. The Pi feeds a Chord Mojo currently, which can be replaced by a much better Dac later on. I must say that I'm happy currenly (touch wood).

But ...

But ...

I also noticed that the more recent Dacs are not necessarily more entertaining than older dacs. And this is maybe why certain companies still build Dac sections around the 1704k chip or other people choose Vinyl solutions.

I have used Alexa (Show) and the Google home, at first a gimmick, then irritating, but after smart camera and smart plug integration I do think there is a niche for control of Naim streamers.

Whether Naim want to be the jacks of all trades is another matter and given the Naim app is poor I'd worry at integrating anything more than the current app.

But if Naim ever do get multi room working, sorry not sure if it is or is not a promised or actual feature, then for sure that is where the likes of Sonos with Alexa type integration will excel.

The coolness of voice controlling Spotify with Alexa is superb, factor in faffing about with your tablet to just adjust volume or change a track (a chore in comparison - usually ending up with a power cycle).

tonym posted:

For those dismissive of Alexa/Siri etc. integration, you may change your tune if you were unlucky enough to find yourself suffering an infirmity. At the moment I can control volume, source and mute using Alexa via my Harmony Ultimate remote, which comes in very handy at times. Still early days for the technology, but it's coming folks!

Good point

Ardbeg10y posted:

I also noticed that the more recent Dacs are not necessarily more entertaining than older dacs. And this is maybe why certain companies still build Dac sections around the 1704k chip or other people choose Vinyl solutions.

My 20-something son sees the idea as great for when he wants to go out for a drink: drive to wherever, distance or remoteness not a concern, and afterwards get in the car and say “home please, James” and get taken home safely, without the cost and hassle of taxis both ways. (Ofcourse, only possible once laws as well as technology permit, but more than likely will one day.)

Innocent Bystander posted:

Ardbeg10y posted:

I also noticed that the more recent Dacs are not necessarily more entertaining than older dacs. And this is maybe why certain companies still build Dac sections around the 1704k chip or other people choose Vinyl solutions.

My 20-something son sees the idea as great for when he wants to go out for a drink: drive to wherever, distance or remoteness not a concern, and afterwards get in the car and say “home please, James” and get taken home safely, without the cost and hassle of taxis both ways. (Ofcourse, only possible once laws as well as technology permit, but more than likely will one day.)

He needs either a GF or a DYI Raceberry Pi Package for a self-driving car.

In my case, the RPi would be safer but less fun.

Ardbeg10y posted:

Innocent Bystander posted:

Ardbeg10y posted:

I also noticed that the more recent Dacs are not necessarily more entertaining than older dacs. And this is maybe why certain companies still build Dac sections around the 1704k chip or other people choose Vinyl solutions.

My 20-something son sees the idea as great for when he wants to go out for a drink: drive to wherever, distance or remoteness not a concern, and afterwards get in the car and say “home please, James” and get taken home safely, without the cost and hassle of taxis both ways. (Ofcourse, only possible once laws as well as technology permit, but more than likely will one day.)

He needs either a GF or a DYI Raceberry Pi Package for a self-driving car.

In my case, the RPi would be safer but less fun.

Assuming GF doesn’t also want to drink! (I’m lucky, my wife doesn’t like alcohol!)

Sorry if I appear blunt or resistant or offensive in any way, it's not intended, but at the moment I can't tell - I'm trying to cope with the CNS toxicity side effects of a local anaesthetic yesterday.  I've now recovered just enough to become aware of the impairment.