Naim UnitiLite review

The disc player only handles standard CDs, but it makes a great job of them. Oddly, the CD player lacks a dedicated eject button. You must press and hold the Stop button to open and close the drive. Annoyinlgy, you can only eject discs in CD mode; you can’t switch to a different input and then eject the disc.

Happily, the UnitiLite has a full control panel next to its monochrome screen, so you won’t suffer if you lose the well-designed remote control. Once you’ve connected the UnitiLite to your network, you can safely set aside the remote control if you have an iOS device.

The Naim n-Stream app immediately detected both the UnitiLite and the UPnP server on our NAS. You can browse music files by folder, genre, artist and artist/album. There are few other options to refine track lists, but there is a search feature. You can only search within the current directory level, but it’s better than nothing. As the UnitiLite is at its best with high-quality lossless tracks, we’d have liked to see the quality of files before we played them, particularly as our server is home to both lossless and lossy versions of some of the same tracks.

The app makes it easy to switch between inputs, browse tracks and set weekday and weekend alarms. We were mightily underwhelmed with the Unitilite’s online streaming features, though.

The UnitiLite’s internet radio tuner lets you browse through a wide range of podcasts and live stations, so you can tune in to Radio 4, subscribe to a Doctor Who podcast and catch up with Cypriot folk music. This is all great, but the UnitiLite has no support for popular music streaming services such as Spotify, Last.fm or Xbox Live Music. Given how much of the music that we discover comes from these sources and how many music enthusiasts subscribe to them, it’s a shocking omission in an internet-connected music device that costs so much.

It’s this lack of connectivity that lets down the UnitiLite the most, as well as the absence of an Android remote control app. If you’re interested in the realm of expensive, high-end audio hardware then the UnitiLite has the sound quality and range of physical connections to make most music enthusiasts very happy. However, we wanted just a bit more internet streaming from this otherwise excellent all-in-one media player.