The music played at this years Bristol Show was rather typical of previous year’s shows, in that I liked some room’s offerings, not others. I have got to know which rooms/manufacturers play stuff I like, and so it was this year.
As I go around the show, I always Shazam tracks I like on my phone. I did notice the list of Bristol Shazam’s this year was considerably down on previous years. Probably because I have discovered quite a lot of ‘new’ stuff/artists I like in previous years, which I heard again this year.
Further to your previous post, having dug around on the net for various NC 200 and 300 written reviews, nearly all of them referenced the use of SL cables, interconnects and/or speaker, and that Naim had supplied said cables with the equipment supplied for review, together with the standard cables as supplied ‘in the box’.
I doubt Naim would have done this without being very confident that the SL loom would offer a noticeable benefit in terms of performance and SQ, usually with the addition of one or more NPX 300 PSU’s .
You might want to add something in the FAQ’s so that anyone interested in the SL XLR interconnect for the NC 200/300 Series can order the right (latest) part number.
Could cost down a NAC332 by (1) having fewer inputs - in my view the 332 has far too many and (2) use surface mount for volume control ladder (as in NSC222) rather than through-hole (as in 332).
Yes, they are decent quality. I’m pretty certain all of those components are from Peter Jantzen and though I can’t vouch for the resistors, even the budget end of their stuff is good quality. Definitely a good choice for any DIYer.
Oh, funny you should say that because I’ve put much of the difference between Class A and A/B down to the difference in the beefiness of the power supplies. Even when they are regulated I think the linear supply part is important - though does anyone other than Naim regulate their power amp supplies? I had assumed Doug Self had put everyone off the idea. And running off single supplies can help too, though inadvertently. We know that higher voltage caps can have significantly lower distortion in electrolytics so, though I’ve not done an A/B on an amp to check this, I think one of the things going for a Sugden A48 is probably its 80V caps. And since you need 6x to 10x the cap values in a Class A, those capacitors get a very easy time of it, especially with their ripple current rating being shared with 5 or more mates. Most important, though, is that they present a much lower impedance to the circuit they are powering. A fun little calculation to do is to work out at what frequency a 10,000uF capacitor gets to the nominal impedance of your speakers. It doesn’t even make it to the stopband!
In fact I’d probably say that cheapskatery in power supplies is one of the principal reasons for there being so many mediocre audio products. A lot are perfectly good designs by good engineers and, if they’re coming from Toshiba, Hitachi or Panasonic, they’re going to have some fantastic components in them - transistors that we would now die to have. That really only leaves tolerances, resistor TCRs and building to a budget as the possible causes - with the supply as one of two cost-defining elements of that budget, and probably the larger. Even good audio products are using reservoir capacitors that are rated to within a few volts of the rails, and some are on or even above the rating. Throw in China-sourced caps with optimistic ratings and Lord alone knows what’s going on but it’s probably not going to be good.
I believe for general utility power amps regulation is typically not undertaken, but in high end audiophile land it is not so unusual, the AES has an interesting paper on the pros and cons of supply regulation for high end ‘audiophile’ amplifiers… it’s certainly not a one way ticket.
Indeed amplifier negative feedback typically compensates to some extent for lack of load regulation.
What’s your budget, the SN3 and Nova PE are not like for like products. Their functionality and designs differ significantly, not to mention the price of the PE!
Many years ago (1977 I think), I went into the Linn/Naim demo room at a HiFi show in Hammersmith. I’d heard a lot about Naim and Linn but assumed it was all hype. I met Julian and was given a demo. I was blown away! I made the decision to buy when I had enough money (which was the following year). I bought a NAC12/NAP160 combo with an LP12 (affordable in those days and fitted with my SME3009 by the dealer).
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