· I use a new Roon Nucleus One. I recently changed my streamer from a Naim NDX2 to a Naim ND 555 and the Roon App no longer shows the signal path of the music I am playing. The ND 555 is set up as a Roon Ready device. I could previously see the signal path with the NDX2. I have tried rebooting Roon but it has made no difference. Can you please advise?
Tell us about your home network
· I use a BT (British Telecom) Super Hub connected by Ethernet cable to the Roon Nucleus One and to the Naim ND555 (in the latter case via a Melco Digital Music Library).
For the ND555 to use Roon Ready, it needs to be connected directly to your home network using an Ethernet cable. If it is connected directly to the Melco, Roon may recognise it as a DAC connected to the Melco if USB is used. However, if the Melco doesn’t provide signalling, Roon will only see the Melco.
Please share a screenshot as suggested by @Suedkiez.
Yeah, but if Roon doesn’t see the 555, it shouldn’t be possible to select it in Roon. And if it does see the Melco, surely it should show a signal path for that.
And the OP said that they set the 555 up as a Roon Ready device, so I’m going from that right now.
As they switched from an NDX2, and the NDX2 and 555 share the exact same streaming board, I guess it was a straight switch without any other changes, and in this case the 555 should behave exactly like the NDX2.
I should clarify that the only change I have introduced is to replace the Naim NDX2 with a Naim ND555. Both streamers connect to my home network via the ‘Player’ ethernet connection on the Melco. When using Roon to play music via the ND555 Roon can see the Melco as a music library and also a Naim Uniti Core that I also use as a music store.
When I played music using the NDX2 I could see a detailed signal path when I clicked on the purple signal icon. This showed me what Roon was doing to process and upscale the signal. Now that I am using the DN555 the signal icon is very faint and when I click on it the signal path is much shorter - similar to the signal path when using AirPlay- and doesn’t show any processing of upscaling of the signal.
There’s nothing untoward with the signal path. The signal is bit-perfect, and there is no DSP applied, neither in Roon nor the device (that it reports.)
but clearly it does show it. The signal path shows what Roon does, and now it simply doesn’t do anything to the signal. That’s why it says it’s „lossless“. This is just fine.
Probably you had MUSE DSP settings for the NDX2, but these settings are a per-zone configuration. Now that you switched to a different streamer, you probably didn’t set up MUSE for it yet, so Roon doesn’t apply anything.
That Signal Path screenshot you shared looks as expected, can you please clarify where the Signal Path is missing on your end, or what is not working right? Thanks!
Clearly I mis-spoke in my original post. I can quite see that Roon is showing the signal path, but it is much less elaborate than the signal path I was familiar with when using the NDX2 - that showed the processing of the signal being undertaken by Roon I had expected the signal path to be displayed in exactly the same way when I changed to the ND555.
Can you please explain what is MUSE and how do I activate it? Your help is much appreciated
I have volume leveling enabled, and so the path has the following steps:
Convert the 44.1/16 source to 64 bit, to enable volume leveling without losses
Do the volume leveling
Do an additional headroom adjustment (not really necessary in my case, I forgot why I left it on; it’s typically used when performing DSP operations that raise the volume. In this case, headroom adjustment adjusts it back down to avoid digital clipping.)
Convert the 64 bit back to 32 bit because this is the default NDX2 input format
At the top, it says “enhanced” because DSP (volume leveling and headroom adjustment) is enabled.
If I turn off volume leveling and headroom adjustment, then it does nothing, like your ND555 path, and it says “lossless” at the top because nothing at all happens:
Like I said, the settings are device specific, so if you didn’t configure the same things for the 555 as you previously did for the NDX2, then the default is simply to do nothing.
If you don’t know what MUSE is, then I suppose the most likely thing is that on the NDX2 you had volume leveling enabled. So simply do the same for the ND555.
MUSE is the name of Roon’s DSP feature, where you can configure many other things, like the headroom management, equalizing, room correction, etc.
As I said, the most likely cause for the difference to the NDX2 path is that you had volume leveling enabled on the NDX2. This is simple and can be very useful, but not critical.
Enabling MUSE features just for the sake of it is pointless. These are powerful DSP options that will make everything worse if you don’t use them with reason.
Performing sample rate conversion, for instance, makes no sense with a 555. The 555 does what it needs internally in its DAC, and I suppose you spent the considerable money on a 555 because you like what Naim does with its DAC.
If you have asymmetrical speaker setup, you could add volume and time correction by using the Speaker Setup filter.
The most generally useful thing is the Convolution Filter. You would measure your room acoustics with a microphone and use special software to calculate a correction filter to remove room modes or adjust your speaker response to your liking. Then you’d load this filter into Roon. But that’s a whole separate topic in itself and you will find several forum threads if you search for convolution filter.
I have an asymmetrical speaker set up - I sit slightly off axis - so Speaker Setup might be worthwhile, but beyond this I may be better leaving the ND555 to do its thing.
I was very pleased with the performance of the NDX2 but changed to the ND555 as I had already invested in the 555PS and wanted to complete the upgrade before I retire and can no longer afford these indulgences.
There is a related issue on which I would welcome your perspective.
I have a Naim CD player (from the XS series) from which I route the digital output to a Naim DAC (with an XPS2 power supply). I have preferred to use the N DAC rather than have it sit in a box unused. Now that I have the ND555 would I be better routing the digital output from the CD player to it and abandon the N DAC? Would the ND555 offer any audible improvement over the N DAC?
This is fundamentally a question about Naim’s own hardware chain (CD5 XS into the nDAC vs. routing into the ND555’s S/PDIF input) rather than anything on the Roon side. The comparative sound quality of those two DAC paths comes down to the specific implementation of each unit’s converter and clocking. I recommend asking Naim’s team directly or posing this question in a more visible category here on Roon Community.
From Roon’s perspective, the newer unit has the advantage. The ND555 is Roon Ready, so once it’s in your system you’ll be able to stream to it directly over the network, which is generally the implementation focus for streamers of that quality.
For the DAC-routing question itself, I’d suggest we move this thread over to a more open discussion category. Our team can move the thread. This will prevent it from closing automatically, and more usefully, it’ll open the question up to the wider community. There are a lot of Naim owners here who’ve run exactly this comparison and can share first-hand impressions, which will serve you better than a single support answer. I’ll go ahead and recategorize it unless you’d prefer otherwise.
About the CD into nDAC or ND555, you could ask on the Naim forum, but I predict the outcome will be that some will swear on the nDAC, some on the 555, and you will be none the wiser. In fact, I bet there are already thousands of posts there about this, and no conclusion.
It’s something you can easily try yourself and use what you prefer.
The nDAC was a really nice DAC, and for current used prices it’s a bargain, but personally and frankly, if a DAC that cost 3K when it was new was better than the flagship ND555 at 25K (and the price isn’t in the streaming board as that’s the same as even in the ND5XS2 and the NDX2), then I don’t know about the ND555. You would have been better off with a cheap Roon Ready streamer feeding the nDAC.
In addition, according to NAIM lore you’d need a 555PS for the nDAC.
