Trolling

[PhilP]

I assume that a lot of the people who are happy with their computers have simply never tried a NAS / UPnP streamer setup.

As for the ones who prefer JRiver to n-Stream or Kinsky, I confess that I am puzzled. How can this ongoing beta (on my iMac) full of bugs, crashing constantly and to my ears sounding worse than iTunes be compared to rock solid solutions like Kinsky or n-Stream? I might have an above average set-up with a managed Cisco switch doing the hard work or delivering the bits from my NAS (good cabling, link aggregation, jumbo frames etc) but I have never experienced as much as a glitch or a hiccup with any of the two platforms. Yes, I had to restart my NDS (but funny enough never my NDX) once. But jRiver is giving me headaches every time I try to use it. And converting my hundreds of FLAC albums to an iTunes friendly format is simply not acceptable...

I sympathise with many of the points you make but as a recent convert to Devialet from Naim my experience has been very different to yours. I bought a D200 in June because I think it offers exceptional sound quality at a very fair price. I find it better in almost every respect than my previous Naim NDX/XPS2/Hi-Line/282/HICAP/200/Fraim system which cost nearly three times as much.

From a usability/maintainability point of view I would prefer to have a dedicated streamer for which the manufacturer takes responsibility for all the issues of software integration and upgrades. But that often comes at a high price - particularly loss of flexibility in terms of integration with services like Spotify and Qobuz e.g. Naim made statements about/"promised" Spotify integration two years ago and have still failed to deliver.

Streamers and associated ethernet networks aren't without their problems too - just look at the endless posts on the Naim and Linn Forums or on Computeraudiophile. I used n-Stream with my NDX for a year and still use it ocasionally. I found it generally robust but rather staid and inflexible. I have had to re-start my NDX several times (perhaps once every 4-6 weeks on average) and the software update process was very poor.

I am very happy with AIR 2.1.2 which I find extremely robust - even when streaming 24-bit files via wi-fi I get no drop-outs and I'm only using a cheap Netgear modem/wi-fi router. The sound quality compares very favourably with NDX/SPDIF which is why I use AIR most of the time.

There have been plenty of warnings about the instability of JRiver on OSX which is why I've stayed away from it.

In my experience it's a fairly trivial and quick task to convert FLAC to AIFF using the batch capabilities of XLD and the results sound-wise are indistinguishable. Not a surprise if AIR does convert everything to WAV anyway.

@Antoine - if I may say so, I thought yours was a very well thought-out and well-written post