Focal and Naim owners picked up another service in the app this month, and this one is narrow on purpose. Presto Music is classical and jazz first, with a catalog of more than 200,000 albums, over 34,000 of those in high resolution, and more than 70,000 digital album booklets attached. Streaming reaches 24-bit/192kHz where both the recording and the hardware allow it.
The implementation is the part worth reading twice. It behaves like Tidal Connect or Qobuz Connect rather than casting: you browse inside the Presto app, pick your Focal or Naim device as the destination, and the streamer pulls the audio itself. Your phone drops out of the playback chain and stays free for reading booklets or lining up the next recording. For hi-res that matters more than it sounds like it should, because nothing is being squeezed through a phone's Bluetooth stack or its opinion about sample rates.
The catch, before anyone goes hunting for an update that will not appear: first-generation Naim streamers are not getting this at all. New Classic firmware 5.4 with Presto support went out on August 5, some Uniti models were pencilled in for around mid-August, and the Mu-so 2nd Generation update was expected before the end of the month. You also need the Presto app at 2.39.0 or newer.
The digital booklets are the feature I would actually use. Classical without liner notes is guessing at which orchestra and which year you are hearing, and no mainstream service has ever pretended to care about that.
Anyone running it yet? I want to know whether the handoff is as clean in practice as the description makes it sound, or whether it stumbles the way early Qobuz Connect did.
The implementation is the part worth reading twice. It behaves like Tidal Connect or Qobuz Connect rather than casting: you browse inside the Presto app, pick your Focal or Naim device as the destination, and the streamer pulls the audio itself. Your phone drops out of the playback chain and stays free for reading booklets or lining up the next recording. For hi-res that matters more than it sounds like it should, because nothing is being squeezed through a phone's Bluetooth stack or its opinion about sample rates.
The catch, before anyone goes hunting for an update that will not appear: first-generation Naim streamers are not getting this at all. New Classic firmware 5.4 with Presto support went out on August 5, some Uniti models were pencilled in for around mid-August, and the Mu-so 2nd Generation update was expected before the end of the month. You also need the Presto app at 2.39.0 or newer.
The digital booklets are the feature I would actually use. Classical without liner notes is guessing at which orchestra and which year you are hearing, and no mainstream service has ever pretended to care about that.
Anyone running it yet? I want to know whether the handoff is as clean in practice as the description makes it sound, or whether it stumbles the way early Qobuz Connect did.
