Click here for systems based on Naim Uniti As something of an old git, I am occasionally tempted to listen to other old gits, when they tell me that music is not as popular as it used to be. However, a quick glance at the facts, soon leads to a very different conclusion. CD sales may be dropping, but the purchase of downloaded music is absolutely booming - Apple has just celebrated its BILLIONTH download, for example. Add to that, the popularity of streaming sites such as Spotify and last.fm, plus the massive growth of controversial peer to peer sites, such as Lime-wire, Vuze and BearShare, each of which boasts millions of online users and you realise that on the quiet, there is actually a massive musical revolution going on.

Another pointer to the true state of affairs can be seen when attempting to buy concert tickets these days. Despite being old enough to carbon date, I still get to see around 30 bands a year and I can tell you that buying tickets for live gigs The O2 complex would house 13 Albert Halls! now, is far more difficult than it was 25 years ago, despite the fact that there are lots more large venues than there used to be. For example, when tickets for the recent Killers tour went on sale, they sold out across the whole of Europe in under fifteen minutes, and many online vendors experienced such heavy demand, that their websites completely crashed. The same is true for many other major artists, not to mention all the summer festivals, most of which didn't exist 20 years ago. I have just returned from the V-festival, which played to a combined audience of 170,000, over two days, yet there still weren't enough tickets to go around. Only one week on from that festival, comes the Reading / Leeds festival, which will play to another 100,000 people. The O2 arena accomodates 23,000 a time, yet it frequently sells out. It is now the busiest concert venue in the WORLD. All-in-all, it's pretty obvious that the a huge number of people now listen to live music.

Another piece in the 'big picture' jigsaw is that music is also far more mobile than it used to be. For an illustration of this, compare a 1970s Sony Walkman with the iPods of today. The Walkman was the size of a paperback book and would play one cassette tape, whereas an iPod is the size of a matchbox, yet can store the equivalent of 500 of those cassette tapes. Not surprising then, that over 206 million iPods have been sold to date. On top of that, there are now over 47 million mobile phones in the UK, many of which sport an in-built mp3 player or FM radio. Then there's the plethora of other mp3 players and memory sticks that exist to give listeners music on demand, almost regardless of the situation. That's an awful lot of mobile music!

When all these facts are viewed together, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the old gits have got it completely wrong, Music is in fact far MORE popular than it has ever been. It is just the WAY that people access it that has changed.

As an industry that is based on the reproduction of music, we need to be mindful of this sea-change and make absolutely sure that HOWEVER our customers choose to access their music, we have equipment on our shelves that is fully compatible with their needs and delivers the very best in sound quality. This final point is particularly important, when you bear in mind that many of the new music storage systems rely on compressed data, which immediately puts them at a disadvantage in the quality stakes. What is required is a piece of equipment that takes these compressed files and wrings every last drop of performance out of them......

......which is where the amazing new Naim Uniti comes in!

The Uniti is a piece of equipment that has been designed from the ground up by Naim Audio, a company that has a heritage of making arguably the best sounding Hi-Fi in the world. What Naim has done, is take a CD transport derived from its award-winning CD5i CD player (RRP £925) combined it with an amplifier section based on its award-winning Nait 5i amplifier, then thrown in a high quality DAB / FM radio, and a DAC developed from its stunning CD5XS CD player (RRP £1825). As a result, the Uniti boasts sound quality to die for and more flexibility than just about any other piece of equipment on the market. It has (deep breath) two optical digital inputs, 2 coaxial digital inputs, three pairs of phono inputs, one DIN input, one iPod input, one 3.5mm audio input, a headphone output, an RS232 output, a front USB port, an Ethernet port and can stream music files wirelessly from your PC, via a router. In other words, however you choose to access your music, the Naim Uniti has it covered - and in style.

Click here for systems based on Naim Uniti...