Tír Na HiFi

jrling wrote:Oh well that certainly got some opinions out!

Horses for courses of course. I have had v expensive separates myself over the years (not NAIM) and currently have Bow Technologies ZZ-Eight and ZZ-One.

For digital play back, one has to rethink one's long held views. Keeping the signal digital all the way to the last stage connected to the speakers makes sense. Avoiding USB/SPDIF conversion/cables/receiver chips all doing their worst to destroy your signal purity makes sense. Doing away with the need for a pre-amp makes sense (the DDA does that lossless digitally by varying the output voltage).Keeping PCM without the need for a DAC (DDA) makes sense. Connecting the parts of the chain together hardwired makes sense. Of course the implementation of all of it is critical and some will be good and others not so good. I have no affiliation with NAD but all those who bought the M Series are glowing about the SQ and build quality (for eye candy look at the M Series).

Lastly, re streaming, Gordon himself says that there is less going on versus a PC transport render loop and Direct Memory Access (DMA) can be achieved without the need for CPU involvement. That's inherently a 'better way' of doing it.

I doubt anyone will agree with me and that's fine. However, I will certainly not change my view that both Windows and a PC is definitely a bad solution to digital audio and I have spent too much of my life trying to make it acceptable.

cvrle59 wrote:

jrling wrote:Oh well that certainly got some opinions out!

Horses for courses of course. I have had v expensive separates myself over the years (not NAIM) and currently have Bow Technologies ZZ-Eight and ZZ-One.

For digital play back, one has to rethink one's long held views. Keeping the signal digital all the way to the last stage connected to the speakers makes sense. Avoiding USB/SPDIF conversion/cables/receiver chips all doing their worst to destroy your signal purity makes sense. Doing away with the need for a pre-amp makes sense (the DDA does that lossless digitally by varying the output voltage).Keeping PCM without the need for a DAC (DDA) makes sense. Connecting the parts of the chain together hardwired makes sense. Of course the implementation of all of it is critical and some will be good and others not so good. I have no affiliation with NAD but all those who bought the M Series are glowing about the SQ and build quality (for eye candy look at the M Series).

Lastly, re streaming, Gordon himself says that there is less going on versus a PC transport render loop and Direct Memory Access (DMA) can be achieved without the need for CPU involvement. That's inherently a 'better way' of doing it.

I doubt anyone will agree with me and that's fine. However, I will certainly not change my view that both Windows and a PC is definitely a bad solution to digital audio and I have spent too much of my life trying to make it acceptable.

I can't say I spent enough time to experiment with Windows, but something is still untouched on this forum, and I would like to hear any opinion. I am learning that "Naim people" are mostly Mac users, particularly Mac Mini is very popular. I am connected to Win through my profession, and PC's are always around me, so I've never played with Mac's. Has anybody here compared these two worlds at all?

nige2000 wrote:I've tested audivarna and ammara vs jplay on my laptop bout 10 months ago jplay was much much better

I retested a few weeks ago by hacking the Msi b85m g43 to but mac os 10.9 mavericks on it with audivarna and it didn't even sound as good as vlc player on win server r2
mac isn't at the races at all im afraid
shame it's a lovely os

cvrle59 wrote:I am extremely happy user of MQn and only missing part is 24-container version to let me experiment with 24/192 versions of recordings. I would like to know if it's worth to buy more expensive and space hungry music, compared to 16/44. It is probably, but only for real good recordings, well mastered. Otherwise, 16/44 well done will kill it. Up-sampling of bad recordings will only lure people who think more bits and samples, better the music.

jkeny wrote:BTW, just to round off our implementation discussion - here's someone who has done a lot of work in this area & produced a SD card player which tries to address all we discussed http://www.ecdesigns.nl/?p=87

Fran wrote:I too would love a 24 bit compatible version of mqn, but other than that, I love what I'm hearing. Perhaps a Linux based system would sound as good, or better though - who knows. One thing though to keep in mind is the availability of drivers for the various usb dacs out there.


Fran