HDX
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The HDX reads audio data from CDs, stores it on a hard disk, catalogues the artist, album and track titles and, at the touch of a screen, replays it with utterly uncompromised sound quality. The HDX’s ease of use defines elegant simplicity and it even offers the option of operating as a high-end CD player by directly playing a disc loaded in its drawer.
The HDX is of course not the first hard disk music player, but it is the first to carry a Naim logo, and with it, all the principles of musical audio quality that the logo demands. It incorporates every last thing we know about maximizing the sound quality of digital audio and is the first hard disk player to reach the heady performance levels of the world’s best CD players – our own.
At the heart of the HDX is a fully integrated CD ripping and data storage system, engineered by Naim – both hardware and software - from the ground up to optimize audio quality. When a CD is inserted in the HDX drawer it is mounted on a specially selected audio grade transport mechanism and each of its data sectors read multiple times at varying rotational speeds to ensure that the subsequently stored data is “bit perfect”. Unique Naim firmware effectively handles copy protected CDs that in most other hard disk music players are likely to be ripped with compromised audio quality. The same firmware also overcomes the track start and end errors that occur in most other hard disk players and ensures that artists’ intended track lead in and out times are preserved – again, in contrast to most other players. The bit-perfect data is stored on two 400GB disk drives – one primary and one back up.
HDX playback begins with a unique Naim designed, multiple power supply PCI interface that feeds the audio data to the digital to analogue conversion stage. The HDX digital audio architecture is not limited to 16 bit and 44.1kHz but can handle bit depths up to 24 bit and sampling frequencies up to 192kHz. The HDX’s playback electronics borrow heavily from the established Naim practices that produce the World’s finest sounding CD players:
Price: £4,590.00
