Naim Audio were incorporated in 1973. Company founder, Julian Vereker, had a unique approach to gutsy and spirited amplifier design and some rather clever thinking in terms of presentation. Having established that power supplies lay at the heart of his products’ unique character, he developed the concept of the upgrade path.
A basic Naim preamplifier could be powered by its partnering Naim power amp but substantial gains can then be made by adding a separate power supply just for the pre-amp. Various performance (and price) levels of pre-amp and power amp, and power supply, most of which were cross – compatible, allowed for the birth of what has probably been the greatest addiction in audio. Electronic Lego, if you will.
Naim products have an extended life, usually well beyond the initial purchaser. Their build quality and attention to detail is the stuff of legend. Naim still support everything that they have ever made, with the limited and fairly recent exception of the very oldest CD transport mechanisms and the earliest streaming tech. Loyalty amongst owners is remarkable. For sure, part of the appeal is the male collecting thing, but a large chunk is the painless ownership experienced coupled with a unique, musical and compelling sonic character.
Naim understand system synergy and, by controlling all of the elements, right down to cables, are able to supply synergistic combinations right out of the box.
Visiting the Naim factory does nothing to undermine faith in the company values. Excruciatingly well organised, impressively busy and amazingly friendly. We’ve seen the famous cable shaker and machinery where the components are pair matched prior to assembly. Consistency between products is a subject close to my heart as an audio dealer and it is impressive to see Naim taking such care.
Should you wish to mix your music system with your cinema one, the pre-amps have the ability to hand control of the front stereo power amp over to the A/V processor but control the power amps directly for music. Simple, elegant and logical. The iOS / Android control of the streamers also allows control of (existing, even 20+ year old) preamp, tuner and CD player.
Since taking on Naim we have pretty well bought the set. We usually have every item in stock on demonstration, now right up to and including Statement. Not a lot of people do this! The new streaming products might be hard to explain (read on to see me falter) but they are stunningly good and remarkably easy to use.
Before we started dealing with Naim it all seemed so simple. The justification for high end cabling was huge. It could transform even a basic system and be more transparent to improvements if and when the hardware was upgraded.
Hands – on experience with the brands that we then stocked indicated to us that the ‘right’ cables could make sense across the board. Cables could, after all, offer performance gains that were simply not attainable any other way. Customers should invest in a really high quality cable ‘infrastructure’ that would see them through many upgrades of electronics in the future.
Once we started dealing with Naim electronics, doubts set in. Initially, it was just some ‘hiccups’ : whilst a ‘serious’ interconnect could be justified from the source component to the pre-amp, the links between the amplifier / psu components definitely sounded best staying with standard black ‘snaics’, and the standard grey snaic for the interconnect took more beating than seemed reasonable. Posh wires seemed to step forward in one area only to completely trash another.
A few years ago, Naim released the HiLine interconnect and this has worked very well for a number of users. It implements the thinking that controlling vibration is the most significant element. The power line mains leads followed and, again, these are more about releasing physical energy than a funky wire ‘recipe’, although the the HiLine does have PTFE dielectric. Both have proved surprisingly effective outside of the Naim sphere too.
2015 saw the launch of a range of properly high end Naim cables called Super Lumina. These were designed for the Statement amplification and, well, something big happened! These seem to ‘square the circle’ and provide as near as dammit the trade-off free upgrade. We carry the set (and some!), so demonstration and home trials are just a phone call away.
Those who have been frustrated by the easily damaged Hi-Line low mass ‘Armadillo’ plugs are pleased to see that the similar-in-concept plugs used for Super Lumina are made from aluminium and are proving to be very durable indeed.
Ah, the Naim Fraim. Pretty, functional, allegedly effective and far from inexpensive. But hey, if Naim make it, it must be best. This might sound silly, but fresh from having to swallow our pride over cables (see above) we really wanted to rebel against this one! We would not do this simply on a point of principal, of course, so we did listen.
Not wishing to overdo it (OK, I guess that we were not hugely ‘liquid’ at the time), we ordered just a base and a single level. Our comparison was with the (then) only Naim integrated amplifier, the Nait 5i and with it’s most rational partner, the CD5x.
Quite simply, our favoured balsa, string and steel rack won hands down. It had less ‘hash’ timed better, just sounded more natural. Wow. We might make less money not selling Fraims, but we can at least be honest, earnest . . . and earn respect for not simply falling in line.
After borrowing a stack of Fraim for the 500 series kit for our 2006 summer bash, we started to pick up on some interesting pieces of synergy, not least with standard Naim cabling.
On further testing we established that the CD 555 really liked the Fraim. It would almost certainly have been designed on it, of course so this makes sense. We finally ‘cracked’ and bought some more levels, placed a CDX2, NAC202, NAP200 on it and re – ran our earlier experiment. It promptly wiped the floor with the ‘other’ stand!
The gains were in the traditional areas of more effortless dynamics, cleaner bass, less glare, more clarity more addictive timing. Amazingly, the very areas where the XR seems to suit the 5 series kit. our own demo stack(s) are in ash with black anodised uprights. And it looks great.
OK, so it’s expensive. If you are using Naim gear above Nait level (or maybe plan on progressing in that direction) it is still a “no brainer”. Sorry and all that
New arrival of 2011 on the support front was the Naim Fraim Lite.
Hideous name aside, it does exactly what you would expect, performing slightly less well than the ‘full fat’ version of Fraim for quite a lot less money. The ironic sales result has been to sell more of the ‘proper’ stuff!
The most interesting comparison for us was when placing a middling Naim system on a few levels of Isoblue: Results were very good, musical, dynamic and spirited. Transferred to the Fraim Lite and it became cleaner, more refined, definitely more musical and compelling. Then onto the good ‘ole full Fraim and got pretty much the same improvements all over again.
Quite how they have engineered something to inhabit the sonic high-to-middle ground, I have no idea, but this is exactly where it resides. You can upgrade by adding the ball and cups and glass shelves from the full Fraim and, in this respect, it makes tremendous sense.
Results with other electronics brands may vary. As with Fraim, uprights can be black or silver, wood choice is cherry, natural ash or black ash.
Getting along with Naim as well as we have has transformed our business over the past twenty odd years..
Over this period, progress has come along in a fairly linear manner. Ever evolving CD players gave way to ever better network based music players, power amplification and power supplies were upgraded substantially around 10-12 years ago and everything fitted into a well-established pattern.
S1 statement electronics were launched in 2014 and represented a break from the familiar building block Naim form factor. These pushed the performance further than ever before yet kept the Naim ‘boogie factor’ and ability to follow complex threads in music whilst adding huge scale, overall resolution and depth. The designer of these products is Steve Sells who is now in overall charge of these matters.
Statement also introduced white, rather than green, illuminated logos, a change that is now making its way through the entire range.
In addition to the existing 500 series, we added Statement S1 pre and power amplifiers to our demonstration stock.
Around 2013, Naim and Focal became sister brands under the ownership of Vervent Audio Group. With Focal already making loudspeakers and Naim being short of space for their ever expanding range of electronics, the decision was made to cease loudspeaker manufacture in Salisbury 2017. Loudspeakers had never represented a huge percentage of Naim’s output but the loss was felt by many all the same.
Few things encapsulate the joined-up convenience of networked audio better than Naim’s all-in-one devices. Mu-so, QB and all the Uniti series are operated from the same control application on either an Android or Apple IOS device.
For existing Naim audio components, a similarlevel of system integration is administered by the relevant music streamer.
On-line services such as Qobuz offer high quality streaming to a standard surprisingly close to that offered by CD replay, arguably above this, in the case of the high resolution offerings.
Sitting between Uniti and what has come to be known as Classic Series (full sized individual components) come Naim’s integrated amplifiers Nait 5Si, Nait Xs 3 and SuperNait 3. The second two have excellent in-built phono stages for use with the ever more appealing turntables that exist out there.
Nait 5si is has line level inputs only. Unusually, the one matching sibling component for this is Naim’s sole remaining CD player, the CD5si.
For Nait XS 3 and SuperNait 3, there are matching streamers in the shape of ND 5XS2 and NDX 2. The latter can take advantage of the new NPX 300 power supply. There is nothing to stop either streamer being used with any of the integrated amplifiers or existing pre amplifiers, come to that.
2023 has seen the arrival of the biggest change to the Naim product line-up in over 20 years. The Classic series referenced earlier on is no more. Welcome to New Classic!
This new range is far less complicated than before: 200 series comprises NSC 222 streamer / preamplifier and NAP 250 power amplifier. NPX 300 comes from the 300 series and is the sole upgrade power supply. It transforms NSC 222 and the existing NDX 2 streamer.
The new Classic 300 range encompasses NAC 332 preamplifier and NSS 333 network player. Both the player and preamplifier can (individually) take advantage of the NPX 300 power supply too. All of the New Classic components have brought an unexpectedly stringent breath of fresh air. Statement design ideas are now in the volume control of NSC 222 and NAC 332.
For the first time, all components can be powered directly from the mains. The power supply is simply part of the upgrade path. Upgrades have never been so simple!
Another fundamental change is towards balanced cabling between all components. Just to prove that Steve Sells can also ‘think different’, the implementation of balanced diverges from the norm. There is a Mini White Paper to explain it.
Overall ability is up significantly. More the point, there is a fresh ‘voice’ too. Familiar Naim aspects of clarity, timing and dynamics are still there but so too are some very agreeable ’round earth’ aspects of spacial resolution and a sense of effortlessness that, many will appreciate.
To our ears at least, these new products are exceptional.
The 500 series remains in production and demonstration items of the entire range are on our shelves. Change is bound to reach this level too but not for a little while yet.