I've been experimenting streaming FLAC from various UPnP servers controlled by a separate UPnP control point running on Android, with the rendering being on my Naim. Control points seem to be a weak point in the chain. Maybe that's because they haven't been a big issue until recently, or perhaps it's because they have interfaces "pointing both ways", but for whatever reason it seems quite hard to get them to play well with renderers and servers.

After a while I got bored with using the remote control and the little green screen on my Naim to suck music from my UPnP server - it's just a little bit too fiddly. I ended up using the excellent Media Monkey to play FLAC, and then send the output out of the optical feed on my sound card to the Naim UPnP player.

That's fine, but then I happened to listen to the player again direct, using streamed FLAC. I noticed straight away that the sound was better when the Naim does the decoding rather than when Media Monkey did it on the PC.

I did suspect I'd turned into a hi-fi moron, but the difference was definitely noticeable and not just the level, it was more complicated than that.

iPods have better sound quality than the plastic speakers on my computer can deliver, and there's been little improvement over the years. People are still playing low-bitrate mp3s, which have been with us since the 1990s. In a world where the BBC can pedal MP2 DAB and get away with it, perhaps no one cares about playing music from computers, but I do. Oh, and maybe Naim does too...

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