Naim Audio Reviews 128

What was once a great company..

...has now turned in to an utter farce.

Im the owner of four Naim Musos. These are £1000 speaker all in one units, bought on the back of the legacy of the company and that they are known to be one of the best at keeping all their software and firmware continually updated which is what we need and want in the quickly changing digital world.

They then broke the software/firmware, and now refuse to fix it.

After a recent software/firmware update, when activating the MUSO's through Airplay (from Roon) the units all come on at full volume. FULL VOLUME. These are powerful amplified speakers - this volume is driver shattering power and I was lucky it didnt damage the units the first few times it happened. Everything was fine before that update.

The temporary fix was to set the max volume in the Naim app to prevent damage - great, as a temporary solution, not ideal as it means you cant go go up with the volume as you have to set it at a gentle level for it to turn on. Complete impractical and not something one would expect from their premium product.

Contacting Naim to find out when it will be fixed, although their customer services operators generally responded with incorrect advice(they dont understand the difference between Airplay and Roon Ready RAAT) , eventually after many weeks, Naim have officially declared they have no interest in fixing the issue and basically customers either live with it or don't (sell up). They now have a 'new' Muso out which dosent have this problem, so essentially they are forcing their existing customers into the upgrade. Bare in mind the new unit costs £1200 and the 2nd hand price of the older ones is less than £400 now because of this new release.

This is a simple bit of code that needs reworking, nothing major.

ALL other Airplay devices used through Roon from the likes of Audio Pro, Bluesound, Bowers etc all work fine and do not have this issue. None of these devices are classed as Roon Ready either (Roon Ready is nothing to do with Airplay which is what the issue is).

This isn't an isolated issue - its widespread with many threads on many forums with large amount of customers affected.

Pretty horrendous really after such a heavy investment in the company. I wont be buying Naim ever again, and will continue to advise people not to either.

Reading the responses Naim give to these reviews, its pretty evident the level of customer service they now work on.

UPDATE:As usual , Naim have ignored the actually issue (AIRPLAY) and blamed Roon (RAAT) which has nothing to do with it, even though this review specifically highlighted what the issue was, and wasn't. Says it all really.

18/12/2020 - Update:
Naim has now managed to fix the problems with the software and everything is working fine. I would like the system to be faster when using the app but that is just a smaller thing. The sound is really really good.

Keep on the good work :)

Bought a Unity Atom and was was very happy for a short time...
The sound i really good but the system had serious problems with screen freezing, very slow remote control that would eventually halt completely, the app was more or less dysfunctional.
Had it send for repair, and after a month I got it back - it failed the second day.
I got new one that failed also within a couple of days.
I have now upgraded it with the newest firmware and it has been working for several day's so I hope it's ok now.
If I had known all this before - I would never have bought this system.
It sounds really good but all the problems have killed the joy.

Response to Naim
I actually have written to Naim support about these problems everytime there was a problem - the last time now I haven't got a response yet, I guess they think that the I could just update the firmware, but I would have appreciated some sort of response from support about it.
The problems would have been easier to live with if there was more information from Naim about this issue -which I learned from your forum that I'm not alone in.