My 1982 NAP 160 arrived from a guy who has several other Naim amps. It’s in excellent conditions and has been serviced by Class A in February 2014.
That said, an unusual thing is, the ‘SNAIC4’ that came with it is neither a grey or a black one but a lavender with plugs and pin scheme to make it a SNAIC4. I’ve been using it between SNAPS and 62 without problems.
I wonder, though, if it’s a very early version of the IC Naim used to connect pre and power amp, only later changed to the current SNAICs, or some FrankenSnaic. It looks exactly like a lavender, same gauge, same feel.
Does anyone have an idea or first hand knowledge?
Looks like a standard DIN4 interconnect of that time period to me. They still sound very good though. In fact, I might even have preferred it with my 42.5/110.
My grey SNAIC is thicker with black sheathing for the first few inches, like this one:
Had one of these , 4 pin din to 4 pin din that had what seemed the thickness and flexibility of a lavender interconnect .
Was all genuine Naim .
I’m sure it went on its travels with a 160 I sold .
Thanks. I’m using it now. It’s an IC after all, going from PSU to power amp. It must have sounded ok then to Naim, and it sounds perfectly ok to me now. Just a tad more rich and less articulated than a later SNAIC.
Max, fwiw I digged up comments from late JV about Interconnect vs Snaic (recalling your earlier post about latching snaic):
Date: June 26, 1999 11:15 AM
Author: julian vereker
Subject: No
Snaics carry power as well as signal, this is not required for the
connection between the CDSll and the pre-amp.
There is something of a compromise involved here, the Snaic needs to
have low DCR because it is carrying the current to power the device,
this implies a large conductor, and at the same time low capacitance
is desirable for the sound quality, and this (sort of) implies small
conductors.
There is no such compromise in a signal only interconnect, hence we
use a different cable to make the audio CDSll to pre-amp interconnect.
julian
grey Snaic’s problems was better solved by black snaic.
Julius,
thanks, it is very interesting and could also partly explain the use of the IC ‘lavender’ cable in my very early pre-SNAIC.
It appears that the adoption of a larger wire for the subsequent ‘proper’ SNAICs is a compromise between the R requests of signal vs DC, slightly in favor of DC. This doesn’t seem to invalidate the previous use of the IC cable as carrier of 24V too. This is why I had a spare lavender IC wired to be used as SNAIC5 by an authorized lab, to check what the effect of favoring signal over DC would be.
If this post violates the forum rules I apologize and ask Richard to emend it the way he thinks right.
The significant difference between the interconnect with power and a snaic is the interconnect has each core individually shielded.
This means left audio is shielded from right audio and the DC power is shielded from both.
I found it more pleasing to use an interconnect rather than grey snaic between a 42 and 160 but conversely with my NAT 101 and snaps, the snaic sounded cleaner than an interconnect
