Discovering Uniti Core’s Custom Credentials

Uniti Core is one of those intriguing boxes that you desperately want to take the lid off, have a good poke around inside and find out what makes it tick. 

Its appearance is unassuming yet eye-catching…there is something about it that keeps pulling your gaze back. As with every Naim product, the internals of Uniti Core do not disappoint.

In creating this home for our digital music collections, the engineers and designers at Naim pooled their creativity, knowledge, love of music and uncompromising attitude towards quality and came up with the fuss-free compact box you can’t wait to get your hands on.

Uniti Core’s operating system is built on a bespoke motherboard and processor, and is about as far from your standard OS as we are from embracing pink as our new case colour. The processor is a Quad core 1 GHz NXP iMX6 on which Core is running a modified Linux operating system, specially tailored to a low-noise motherboard.  Of course, this setup would not be complete without a custom Naim designed sound card. It is a very clever build - offering far superior performance over an off-the-shelf version, that reduces power usage and operating temperature, so you have a greener and more reliable server. The combination of bespoke motherboard, high-speed processor and custom OS, allows the seriously powerful Uniti Core to take bit-perfect copies of your CDs, store your music safely and serve it effortlessly to Uniti players and other Naim streaming products. If you’re looking at Uniti Core and thinking ‘this is great…but I need a source’, fear not: connect Uniti Core to a DAC or an amplifier with digital inputs and it will transform into a standalone digital source controlled via the app - versatility and performance in one.

During the design stages for Uniti Core, the team looked exhaustively at every aspect of the hard-disk server build.  They scrutinised and questioned everything with a critical eye, resulting in several ‘eureka!’ moments in the workshop, one of which was to create a removable hard drive caddy.  In our previous servers the operating system is stored on the internal hard drive, meaning an owner could not change the drive without sending it back to Naim HQ.  A streak of genius struck the R&D team and a removable caddy was born.  An integral part of the reasoning behind this unique feature was to move the OS from the hard drive and hold it on the system’s internal memory, allowing the owner to install their own HDD or SSD, and change it as their music collection grows.  It’s not just about versatility at Naim though, developing the caddy took time; Naim’s exacting sound quality standards had to be maintained and improved upon.  They achieved this by engineering the caddy so it floats; for those among us who don’t speak Engineer, floating it means the vibrations the hard drive creates are not coupled into the rest of the product.  ‘Vibration’ and ‘interference’ are Very Bad Words in the world of audio, so decoupling the caddy means Roy and our engineers remain happy with the sonic performance of Uniti Core.

As with all aspects of Naim’s development process, the creation of Uniti Core was painstaking; nerves were frazzled, many biscuits and much caffeine was consumed, and the result is nothing short of outstanding and unique; Uniti Core is an industry-reference server.  Naim took the time, nearly three years of it, to build Uniti Core and the players of the Uniti range from the ground up, piece by piece…if this was fashion they would be couture.