Hi.
Just out of interest why are there no Lumina SNAIC4 and SNAIC5 cables?
Do NAIM feel that even, amongst a full loom of Lumina, the standard SNAICs going from, say, the Supernait 3 to the HicapDR and back will have no impact on the SQ, so manufacturing Lumina SNAICs will bring no benefit?
Is the improvement, or not, in SQ only perceived, by NAIM, in the Luminia interconnects and loudspeaker cables?
I thought they had tried to make them but they just did not work at the level they thought could be justified, price wise?
Maybe routing the signal through the power supply is indeed ultimately limiting (not a new thought to some)
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While maybe not the best idea, I believe the big downfall is routing power & signal in both SNAIC’s & Burndy’s in the same cable & as far as I’m aware, without shielding. Improving this would have a big impact on performance/there’s a lot of performance still left untapped in these OC boxes. So finding additional performance shouldn’t have been an issue.
I would have expected shielding…
Naim has always maintained that routing that way gives best sound quality, which suggests the sognal part of the cabling must be at least as good as their interconnects.
That is certainly my experience.
I can confirm this isn’t the case, but I believe going any further into an explanation would be against forums rules, so unfortunately will have to leave it at that.
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Shielding isn’t a magic bullet and brings it’s own problems. If I remeber correctly, the current unshielded arrangement was after listening tests.
Worth noting that within the cable, the power is clean DC so that shouldn’t be an issue in terms of signal pollution.
I use ferrite chokes on both ends of all my SNAICs to help mitigate common mode noise.
There is some anecdotal evidence from Richard on the previous forum about Naim’s attempts to Super Lumina-ize preamp Burndys and SNAICs but all prototypes sounded worse than the current ones so they abandoned. No doubt people would have absolutely bought them anyway but I don’t think Naim are in the business of releasing things that are not in their view a step up from what went before. Obviously, we don’t all agree on what constitutes an improvement but it’s their product so they get final say. Which is fair.
In their view, the preamps and power supplies are part of an inseparable whole that just happens to be in two boxes. As such SNAICs and Burdys should be viewed as internal wiring, not interconnects.
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Interesting, however, that the new classic design removes the audio signal path from traveling through a dedicated power supply via a burndy - so I’d suggest that the previous approach does, indeed, limit the performance.
I believe Steve posted on the NC200 release thread that there was immense pressure to adopt a more standard connectivity model to improve interconnectivity with other brands which tend to be XLR. Which had hitherto been sort of locked out by proprietary connectivity and reliance of older power amps to see a normalised signal from a Naim preamp.
When pressed on balanced versus single ended he confessed to still slightly preferring single ended over balanced. But the wind has been strongly blowing in a different direction for a while.
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