Living by Numbers

Deep down in my subconscious, I've just discovered, is a line or two of programming that says my music somehow needs to be linked to a. Whether it's a 30cm black vinyl think, or a 12cm lacquer coated aluminium thing, or a little plastic cassette of iron oxide coated mylar, it's got to be a tangible, physical thing.

Hi-Fi magazines are often guilty of cheerleading new technology on, trying to get themselves associated with vibrant new trends in audio, just as politicians love being seen in the company of best selling rock bands or big box office movie stars.

When CD players arrived in 1982, hi-fi mags rushed to bring you the low down on those lovely new laser discs, making bold pronouncements (along with its creators) of it being "the shape of things to come". Digital Audio Tape was another, albeit fleeting, sensation ("DAT wipes out CD" being one headline, as I remember) that needed countless column inches of purple prose. We had MiniDisc, DCC, DVD and of course SACD, which were all momentarily praised, some with good reason, others not. And then home cinema, which - if you believe some hi-fi magazines - was going to result in us all selling our prized two-channel systems for a brave new world of surround, complete with eight loudspeakers in our small British listening rooms!

This is now happening with computer audio, of course. Magazines are just beginning to wake up to the possibilities, and suddenly we hi-fi hacks are all frantically ripping our CDs to Network Attached Storage drives and fiddling around with different types of codec.

Now I do like computer audio, and have used it daily for several years - much of my hard disk music collection is date stamped 2005 or 2006, when I really began to get into iPods and Squeezeboxes. The experience of using this has always been mixed however, but I consoled myself that when we start getting really decent hardware, it's going to transform things; one day, I always thought, my CD player would lie unused and unwanted...

Well, I am sensing that the time is now - or at least very near. With products like the Logitech Squeezebox Touch at one end of the market and the Naim NDX at the other, we're finally getting to the crunch point where the positives at last outweigh the negatives. This past month I've spent a good deal of time in the company of the NDX (and matching UnitiServe NAS drive) network music system, living the computer audio dream. And I have to say it's definitely one of the most highly evolved products of its type; the fact that Naim offer a RipNAS-type product in a matching Naim box, with all the associated Naim niceties (bespoke optical transport and HDD, top ripping engine and internet metadata lookup), makes it all the more plausible.

So it's 'game on' for computer audio done properly - no holds barred, no excuses made? Well yes, but do you know what, I've had the funniest feeling about it in the past few weeks - having lived by numbers with the superb NDX/UnitiServe combination? And it's that there's just something not quite right. Despite the Naim combo being a totally faultless ripping and playback solution - almost beyond criticism - something inside me personally is nagging away saying it's just not natural!

Despite having enjoyed easy hi res playback, instant access to loads of CD-quality music, and easy internet radio too, I am still struggling to see myself using a network music player as my main source. And if I was going to spend the £5,000 or so the Naim combo costs, I'd be expecting it to be my main source!

There's nothing wrong with the Naim. Indeed it's the fact that there's nothing wrong with the Naim that has finally let me rationalise this feeling in me, because with all other computer audio systems I've had there has been something wrong - the sound's not quite right, there's no disc ripping drive, the software's flaky, the set-up is a chore. Because the Naim's such a complete package, I can now see that - for me - the whole process doesn't feel right. In short, I am missing my physical media.

Deep down in my subconscious, I've just discovered, is a line or two of programming that says my music somehow needs to be linked to a thing. Whether it's a 30cm black vinyl think, or a 12cm lacquer coated aluminium thing, or a little plastic cassette of iron oxide coated mylar, it's got to be a tangible, physical thing. It was hard enough teaching my ears to listen to digital music (a process that still isn't complete, and is only partial at best), but teaching my head to listen to music without the associated physical paraphernalia is going to be - shall we say - a real uphill challenge.

I still rather like the process of picking something up and slotting it in the machine, then looking at the real, physical, printed artwork as the music plays. It's something I'm used to, and whilst the NDX has a neat iPhone app and there's always the screen to look at, there's still relatively little 'sense of occasion' to computer audio in this respect. That's why - although the NDX beats a CD player on so many levels - I still find myself oddly attracted to the idea of using the CD player...

This has got to be an age-related thing. I've noticed my parents' generation seemed to get particularly flabby in middle age, maybe because they grew up in wartime with food shortages? They often wear coats in cars in the winter because they're still not used to the idea of dialling in the climate control and heated seats to sub-tropical settings. There's a certain rigour that they have when filing things; all CDs are neatly labelled; whereas the iTunes generation doesn't bother. All very quaint and whimsical to my eyes, but in thirty years' time, my own generation's children will surely be wryly observing how my contemporaries cling to redundant physical objects despite their chronic lack of living space!

We're getting to the stage where most folk under thirty haven't properly ever experienced physical music media, so they simply won't miss it when it's gone. Indeed, their houses will likely be so small that they wouldn't have room for 500 discs in the first place, so it will all be on their hard drives, along with their favourite movies. But my generation is still used to the idea of music coming on something, even if it's a memory stick for heaven's sake!

The young generation (and how old I feel just writing this phrase) will completely 'get' network music machines like Naim's NDX. There won't be a strange, deep-down feeling of emptiness when they play their tunes, via disembodied, ghostly formats - digital facsimiles of things that never had a form - whizzing around wireless home networks at ultra high frequencies. Meanwhile myself and my friends - the last of the vinylistas - will continue to dust down our yellowing record sleeves for decades to come. Why? Because they're 'real', aren't they?

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