Last week British hi-fi legends Naim Audio released details of their latest advancements. This time the upgrades are coming to their already extremely popular Uniti range of all-in-one products.
The entire Uniti range has been upgraded with the exception of the UnitiLite. The top of the range is the Uniti Nova which was the SuperUniti. The Uniti 2 now becomes Uniti Star and the UnitiQute has been renamed Uniti Atom. Naim have also updated their hard disk server UnitiServe, which now goes by the name Uniti Core.
The new Unitis are something to behold. They feature beautiful industrial design, reminiscent of Naim’s flagship amplifier Statement. The Unitis feature a brushed aluminium chassis with extruded heatsinks for thermal stability and isolation, a highly-polished full colour LCD display and the ultra-smooth volume control.
Naim don’t upgrade their products unless there is going to be a significant improvement. The change in sound quality that was achieved from the Uniti to the Uniti 2 was night and day, so it is safe to say the new Uniti range will bring a significant benefit over the current models.
Uniti products are currently some of the most versatile hi-fi items on the market, but the new range has more services and features added still. Additions include Google Cast, HDMI ARC, an SD Card slot (with ripping feature of the Star) as well as support for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz wi-fi networks.
Under the hood, the Unitis have seen a number of improvements also. The new Atom, Star and Nova now feature an incredibly powerful new 4th Generation 40- bit SHARC DSP processor, the ADSP 21489 capable of 2700 MFLOPS running at 450Mhz. The SHARC processor implements Naim’s RAM buffer (first used in the DAC and NDS and called zero S/PDIF) then 16 times oversampling and digital filtering. The oversampling and digital filtering software in the DSP is Naim written. This allows the digital filter section in the Burr Brown DACS to be bypassed delivering significant sound quality improvements.
All three new Uniti player products use premium Burr Brown DACs and analogue filter sections and output stages constructed from similar high-end components to those in their respective preamplifier sections. Using an extremely powerful SHARC also allows for future updates both in performance, formats and features.
The pricing remains very competitive with the current Uniti prices. The RRPs are as follows –
Uniti Nova (with Tuner module) – £4,249
Uniti Nova – £4,099
Uniti Star (with Tuner Module) – £3,449
Uniti Star – £3,299
Uniti Atom (with HDMI) – £1,849
Uniti Atom – £1,749
Uniti Core – £1,799
We are now taking pre-orders for all models. Uniti Core is the first to be available which we expect in early November. The Atom (without HDMI) will ship in early December with the HDMI version coming early January. Star and Nova models are expected early 2017.
If you are interested in purchasing a Uniti, please get in contact.