Naim Uniti Atom Wireless Music Player
A Naim you’ll remember.
IS IT AN INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER with onboard wireless and network streaming, or an audio streamer with built-in amplification?
Yes. The Uniti Atom, from British iconoclast Naim Audio, is both of these, as well as a quarterback for the company’s Mu-so wirelessmultiroom ecosystem (and a few other things mixed in). Like all Naim products since the brand’s inception in the mid-1970s, the Atom is distinctly different from most competing designs in both appearance and operation; the company’s proximity to the powerful vibrations of Stonehenge doubtless has something to do with this tradition. That said, the Atom is less different from its competition than many a previous design, because this sort of streaming amp is what the classic stereo integrated amp seems to have morphed into, here in the postphysical-media 21st century. But perhaps the rest of the world has simply caught up, or caught sideways, to Naim.
Still, the Atom has its distinctions. It exploits the digitally governed analog volume control Naim uses in their preamps and integrated amps for maximal sound quality, along with the same sort of massive toroidal transformer and meticulous powersupply design. It’s also packed with a high-zoot power cord that the maker relies on for noise decoupling. More important (in my book, anyway), its digital-to-analog hardware is capable of up to 384 kilohertz/24 bits resolution and decodes every important hi-res format up to and including DSD128.
Setup
The Atom is the “all-in-one wireless player” member of Naim’s Uniti line, which includes hard-disk library and Cd-player/ripper companions, among others. It’s a machinedaluminum art object with the kind of fit and finish that few other brands can equal—sort of Bang & Olufsen but for tech nerds rather than interior-design geeks. From the side-inset heatsinks to the front panel’s gorgeously high-resolution color display, the Atom’s quality look and feel are unmissable.
Around back, there are three digital inputs (one coax, two optical), an analog-stereo line input, and an analog-stereo line pre-output. In addition, there’s a sole, Arc-ready HDMI port meant for Tv-audio reproduction—stereo-only, of course. You also get an RJ-45 Ethernet jack (Wi-fi is built in, too, with internal antennas integrated into the heatsinks) and a USB port for fixed storage, such as on a hard disk or thumb drive. (A second USB jack lives up front, along with a headphone minijack.)
The only tricky installation bit is the speaker-cable hookup: The Atom provides stereo banana-plug sockets set into the rear panel, but these aren’t spaced for U.s.-standard (½-inch) pairs. The unit comes packed with matching dual-pin plugs to be affixed to your speaker wires, but despite the stern warning printed on the back panel (probably a liability issue in the U.K., where their Ac-mains plugs are similar), the individual bananas I used worked just fine, and my house has yet to burn down. I also know not to connect my speaker wires directly to a wall outlet. Otherwise, setup of network, libraries, rooms, and so on is self-guided via clear, step-wise, onscreen instructions, and unlike a few other such products I’ve experienced, everything proceeded without a hitch.
Listening
The Uniti Atom may provide only 40 watts per channel of rated power, but
The Atom’s quality look and feel are unmissable.
apparently Naim watts are like U.S. dollars in Australia: At no point in my listening did I feel shortchanged in level, dynamics, or slam, compared with my everyday 150-watt-perchannel power amp. And everything I played through the little Atom sounded simply great. I added a handful of 320-kilobitper-second internet-radio streams to my list of “Favourites” (British, remember?), and almost every one sounded unexpectedly hi-fi. (In doing so, I stumbled across a wonderful Arnold Bax string quartet, hitherto unknown to me, that sounded exactly like a bastard child of Elgar and Bartók—precisely the sort of discovery that makes me love internet radio.)
I did most of my evaluative listening to files streamed from my own library, which sounded uniformly as excellent as I expected. Stuff like Lyle Lovett’s beautifully recorded “Cowboy Man” from Anthology, Volume One (a lossless FLAC rip) was solid and present, with a razor-sharp stereo image filling the entire width of the speakers and even a bit more; meanwhile, the steady thump of kick-drum/ standup-bass unisons had the kind of meaty definition I’ve long heard from my much bigger everyday setup. Lovett’s quirky baritone had real projection out front, as well as the airy, float-inspace nature that signals true high-fidelity reproduction. But the Atom’s hallmark seemed to be its handling of definition and detail. A 192/24 FLAC file of the Firebird Suite (Budapest Festival Orchestra, Ivan Fischer) sounded broad and deep, but it retained impressive soundstage expansiveness and layering through even the most complex of Stravinsky’s textures, with equally satisfying heft and definition to the big, loose bass drum that punctuates the climax.
The Ergonomic Side
For any new-age component like the Uniti Atom, the handson experience is probably as important to real-world potential customers as the sonic one. There’s a lot going on in a design like the Atom, so how Naim handles the user interface is key. The front panel has a quartet of hardware buttons beside the razor-sharp screen (which, though it seems like it should be a touchscreen, isn’t one); in addition to power, play/pause, and input (step-through), there’s a Favourites button that calls up a list of internet streams. The most obvious hardware control, though, is the ginormous, illuminated volume knob set into the top panel. This is undeniably cool, but it means that stacking something like a USB hard drive (or a pile of CDS) on top is a nonstarter.
Naim supplies a very sexy, motion-activated, illuminated remote control that duplicates these commands and adds a few more, such as skip, mute, and (display) brightness. Naim bills this as a two-way remote, but the only real reverse info is a
duplication of the top-panel knob’s volume-level indicator, a curveddashes circle that lights up and grows or shrinks in length as volume changes. This is situated around the remote’s five-way navigation key set.
The interface I imagine the majority of users will end up employing most of the time—i did, anyway—is the Naim app (IOS or Android). Having loaded this to my iphone 6 in response to front-panel prompts during the Atom’s setup routine, I found it to be almost entirely intuitive, with intelligent layout choices and clean, well-organized graphics and screens. That said, I still had a couple of peeves. A larger typeface for track and title listings would have been welcome. (Although there’s a broad selection of wallpaper themes available, I could find no way to modify this default.) And the volume slider found at the bottom of the screen was sometimes a bit slow and lumpy in its response. Nor could my phone’s up/down volume buttons be designated to activate it; for smooth, instant volume adjustment, I needed the Naim remote control.
Odds, Ends, and the End
The Atom’s front-panel headphone output—a ⅛-inch stereo minijack— serves up fine listening. I tried a trio of headphones from NAD, Hifiman, and Sony and had ample level and copious sonic finesse from all of them (though the hardest-to-drive Hifiman Edition X needed most of the Atom’s volume-control range to reach concert-like levels on wide-dynamic-range material). A bit surprisingly, I found no way to select net-library streaming from the front panel, where one might find oneself for headphone listening; doing so requires either the remote control or the app. The Atom is expandable to an outboard power amp via its Rca-jack line outs, or, I suppose, a subwoofer, though without bass management. There’s a groundlift switch on the back panel to break any ground loops, but my Atom setup remained dead silent in either position.
In sum, I loved almost everything about Naim’s Uniti Atom streamplifier—everything, that is, except the price. Which is not to say that $3,000 is unfair for so beautifully conceived, engineered, and executed a product; if the Atom were only a passive piece of sculpture that did nothing but light up alluringly and look high-tech, you could doubtless find plenty of well-heeled folk to buy it without hesitation. It’s just that plenty of brands—nad and Yamaha spring to mind, for two—will sell you less elegant but similar functionality, less intuitive but similar integration, and less refined but similar performance for a great deal less.
Similar, but not identical. And similar is not identical, especially in the case of this—or, for that matter, any— Naim product. If you value originality as much as quality and performance, the Uniti Atom just may seem a bargain.