Hi Andrew. My Naim unitiserve recently died and on hearing the unbelievable amount of money Naim charged I looked elsewhere. I bought myself an Audiostore Prestige Ultra plus. This allowed me to convert my Naim NDS into a device that I could use Roon through. I am so impressed with it. Comes with Roon pre-installed - all basically set up and ready to go. They rescued my music from my dead hard drive - amazing service. It provided a significant uplift in sound quality over my unitiserve. Anyway, it resulted in my going down a rabbit hole resulting in my shedding 4 black Naim boxes and replacing with a Rossini APEX and clock.
If you are UK / Europe based I would strongly recommend - otherwise small green computer in the US do similar. Martin at Audiostore is so knowledgeable and generous with his time if you reach out (make sure you are in a comfy chair before calling him though!). Loads of configuration options including optical connections and significantly outperform Roon nucleus.
Welcome to the forum Andy and congratulations! I would hazard a guess that you are in quite a happy, smug place right now!
As an aside we also had a death in the Naim family this Christmas. After About 15 years the display on my father’s original Uniti had decided it didn’t want to play any more. I sent it back to Naim but they said it was one of the first models and that the display board couldn’t be swapped. Not exactly what I was expecting from Naim!
The dealer was extremely helpful and offered to take £3,500 from me for a replacement. Only problems with that were (a) no CD Transport (the old man, 93 y o is not exactly a child of the streaming generation) and (b) No 24V out to power his Stageline. No problem! Undeterred the dealer helpfully suggested it was high time he acquainted himself with streaming “can’t buy CDs any more anyway” (in fairness I am a lot older than I look and he didn’t enquire about my father’s age) and even offered to take another £500 from me for a standalone power supply for his Stageline!
This gave me all the motivation I needed to get onto eBay to see what second hand Unitis were going for. That’s when I noticed all these replacement displays on sale from China for every single Naim model ever made. £100 and Robert is your father’s brother! Only had to dismantle the whole thing and de-solder and re-solder a well hidden daughter board. But hey, my soldering skills needed brushing up and what else was I going to do with my Christmas vacay? All good now, old man is over-the-moon but unfortunately no sale this time for the dealer!
I often see mentions on this forum of “end game” systems. Well, I am reasonably sure this is true in his case. I sometimes joke that he is on the final lap, to which his wrinkly old face lights up with joy and he loudly proclaims “Last lap? Me? I’m on my bloody victory lap!”
Given his “can’t buy CDs any more anyway” perhaps fortunately may be more appropriate. Especially as industry figures are showing a more stable CD market and there appears to be some sort of CD revival now ( echoing the vinyl revival). Several new CD players were announced over the past months, a positive sign for the medium compared with the recent past years. Mind you personally I remain mainly streaming ( local and services) these days. However I am a spring chicken compared to your father. Incidentally most of my friends will simply not touch streaming their own files as being too complex and stick with CD.
I am never sanguine about lies to gain a sale anyway.
I’ve also been using Apple Music a lot more and Roon, dCS and others are not integrated with it. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s too new or if Apple makes it hard or impossible to integrate with it.
I still also have Tidal and Qobuz. As someone recently wrote, if you love music and love streaming, at their price why not keep them all and see where we eventually land. Each has pros/cons.
I don’t think he was lying. Afaik he was right and there is no current Naim with equivalent functionality to the original Uniti and I had said it was too late for my father to learn a new UI so it was Naim or nothing. The top-of-the-line all-in-one (Uniti Nova?) offers neither a CD transport nor a 24V out. So we ended up where I should have started, just fix his original unit. I guess I just lacked the imagination to predict that (a) Naim wouldn’t be able to fix it and (b) that I would!
Has anyone direct experience in A/B testing a Grimm MU1 or Innuos Statement (or other model) vs a Roon Nucleus + as a pure Roon Core and hi-res files storage connected to a dCS Vivaldi system?
Been successfully using a Grimm MU1 feeding a dCS Vivaldi Upsampler via AES/EBU, as part of a dCS Vivaldi stack, for nearly a year. I’d come from a Roon Nucleus and then Nucleus Plus. Quite a leap in sound quality for me.
I think he answered that Franco. He has the Grimm connected to the AES 1 input on the Upsampler and then the Upsampler to AES 3+4 and the Transport to AES 1+2 on the DAC as per usual. There’s no clock input on the Grimm so you’ll need to set the clock sync for that AES 1 input to Audio.
Ah, yes, you’re right. I completely forgot about that, apologies (don’t have a transport myself). So the only audio interfaces available to add a music server to a fully connected full stack system are SPDIF, SDIF or USB.
I’ve tried it (i.e., without upsampling) and to my ears it was sonically inferior.
So the question is why should I change to something inferior?
As I said, I’m going to try a good streamer in two configurations: 1) s a server only replacing my Roon Nucleus a (i.e., only connected to the same ethernet switch to which the Upsampler is also connected to) in order to store and play back hi-res files and as a Roon Core as well; and 2) as a streamer connected via USB.
I’m doubtful that I’ll like the second option in light of my experience with Aurender but I’ll try.
Sorry, I misspoke. I don’t have the dCS player, as I’ve always ripped my CD’s to a Synology NAS wired directly into an etherREGEN switch. My network access point as well as my dCS Upsampler also are wired to the switch. I have found that the AES/EBU output into the Upsampler offers a better sonic result than using the dCS Mosaic to access my local music via DLNA running MinimServer on the NAS feeding the Upsampler. Or when I play Qobuz via Roon on the MU1 into the Upsampler versus using Mosaic to access Qobuz.
Unless I’m mistaken the MU1 does not engage the FPGA for anything but its digital AES and S/PDIF outputs. Note the MU1 Hardware manual block diagram.
As an aside, I did test using the MU1’s own upsampling options, bypassing the Upsampler and directly connecting into the Vivaldi APEX DAC. This alternative was not nearly as nice, as you probably discovered. And I’ve always sought to minimize any sorts of software based signal processing if possible.
The only thing that I’m interested in trying next: once Grimm finally delivers DLNA and Audirvana support, I’m interested in using JPLAY or Audirvana as an alternative to Roon. I still have my original Roon Nucleus that I’ve updated by doubling up the memory so it can effectively support my 100k+ song library. For my primary system I’m willing to sacrifice Roon for potentially better SQ.
Just for completeness: well before I got engaged with the Nucleus and later the Plus version, I’d run Roon on a Mac Mini and before that an Aurender N10.
I’d left Aurender for Roon so I could have a far more flexible playback environment (lots of zones) and better library manager and variety of network sources.
I don’t mean no upsampling (44.1). What I mean is to let the transport do the upsampling to your preferred setting, AND turn regular PCM off (important step). I have said this before. This is what I use. Do you then still prefer the upsampler?
