Copyright Naim Audio 2010
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Network Streaming
Using the UPnP™ network protocol the NDX plays music
stored on a hard drive across a standard ethernet network.
With today’s trend of downloading or ripping music
to hard drives the ability to achieve audiophile sound
quality from music data stored on an HDD or NAS is
paramount. Good engineering techniques and principles
were utilised to realise this goal with the NDX, as with all
Naim products, but this project posed some new and
interesting challenges.
The first requirement for achieving high quality sound
reproduction from a hard drive is that music data ripped
from CD must be of the highest possible quality. So the
ripping engine developed as part of Naim’s HDX hard
disk player became the first building block of the NDX.
Although the HDX can also play audio files from network
devices, it and the NDX work differently. The HDX is a
hard disk audio player where the music is played from
the internal hard drive or from music files found on the
network. The HDX scans the network to find playable
media which are then added to the database and can be
played. By contrast, the NDX uses the UPnP™ network
protocol to find UPnP™ servers on the network and play
audio files served by these servers. As part of the NDX’s
development Naim has tested many UPnP™ servers and
we have written our own UPnP™ server for Naim’s own
server products. So now the HDX and the new UnitiServe
are not only hard disk players but also UPnP™ servers,
from which the NDX can stream audio.
Naim’s UPnP™ servers deliver the uncompressed audio
data ripped from CD using the Naim ripping engine to
ensure the best quality reproduction. Uncompressed
audio data will always give better results than compressed.
Even lossless compression may not reproduce audio with
equivalent quality to the uncompressed original as the
processing required to uncompress the data increases
the computational load. This raises the power supply
noise floor, which detracts from the sound quality.
Control Devices
HDX
USB memory stick
Computer
NAS
NDX
Audio Out
UPnP Servers
Network
A typical network layout incorporating the NDX
