Farewell to NAIM
Back in 2003 I bought a NAIM CD5 with a Flatcap 2 and I have loved using it ever since. Among those of us who like a good sound system, contentment seems to be fleeting, but I don’t conform to that characteristic, so I guess anyone who starts to look at this thread will probably stop somewhere about now.
The strange thing about the very modest system for which the CD 5 ensemble became the primary source was that in my lounge, it worked very well. I have friends who are more typical hifi afficionado’s and the odd thing about my system was that it seemed that the components and the room had found a sweet-spot and it confounded people who heard it. It was an Arcam amplifier and a pair of Epos ES 11’s and what they did together they did very well, and what they couldn’t do, they gave up trying in a very gracious way. For my hifi friends, they knew they were not getting everything, but what they did get seemed so beguiling, they didn’t mind. I guess this will be another place I will lose readers.
But the Arcam amp died, so replacement made me look again. By now I was so old, I was having “If you don’t do it now, when are you ever going to do it?” conversations with myself, and I can assure you that one recollects more youthful aspirations at such times and I had always though I would like to try some electrostatic speakers, so the search was on for something with a lot of power. When your starting point is a zero budget, this presents a challenge and it was resolved by finding a recent, but used, Musical Fidelity M6 500 amplifier. Having a kilowatt at my disposal should suffice for any further aspirations that might grab me.
The first thing I learned with that installed was that I while needed to be careful with the volume control, it was much less problematic than I imagined. The second thing that became abundantly clear was that the ES 11’s sounded even better than ever. I was prompted to try a few experiments, and it didn’t seem to matter what speaker was being driven by the M6 500, the speaker did a much better job with that amp than it had ever done with anything else. To put in a good word for NAIM, I think the reality is that superior power supplies mean that the grip the amp has over the speaker is such that the transducers have no option other than to DO EXACTLY AS INSTRUCTED. That is my experience.
I decided to move the ES11’s to my second home, and they were replaced as temporary measure (with speakers called Quadral Chrome 8’s), simply as an inexpensive stop-gap until I could source some electrostatics. In fact, I haven’t bothered because I am amazed (two years on…) at how good they sound. Everything the NAIM stuff produced was so much better. Contentment was restored.
So why is it farewell to NAIM?
The CD player had a little glitch, as the rare earth magnet started to break up and wouldn’t properly clamp some discs. NAIM Support were extraordinarily assiduous in trying to help, but to no avail. The fix would be a replacement transport, but the received wisdom is that there aren’t any that actually work. I documented elsewhere on this site the eventual fix, which it cost six pounds to effect, but it made me wonder what I would do if it ever became unfixable.
One of the things that one needs to do if one has a second home, as I have, and likes a good sound system, is to figure out how that can be achieved without duplicating all the sources one already has. My solution in my second home was a streaming DAC with an in-built hard drive to which I ripped my CD’s. Streaming from the Internet as a source was simply not an option. BT sell me a very expensive (compared with fibre) copper landline Internet connection that on a good day will give me 1Mb per second download. If it rains, it might not work at all.
It must be acknowledged that if you have two different systems in two vastly different houses, they are unlikely to sound identical. However, in my second home, I now had the sensation, and I use the word “sensation” as a starting point, because while I expected things to be simply presented differently, I had this sensation that some tracks had more than I expected, not less, and over time that developed from a surprised and sceptical sensation, to a slightly baffled conviction that the system in my second home was being sent bits that were absent in my primary residence.
The device I had bought had a lot of guff about how the ripping process stove to make a “bit-perfect” digital copy of the ripped CD’s. The guff says it doesn’t perform a single read and digital to analogue conversion in real time which has to happen when a track is played. It reads the data more than once and stores it when it has the best copy it can achieve. I thought that could be a possible reason for what I heard, but I could not possibly know. But it is not an artifact of different listening volume or anything else I can think of. There are sounds I hear now that I didn’t hear previously. Contentment was disturbed.
If you got this far, I should remind you I am old, and the “If not now, when?” stuff kicked-in again, so with the January sales in place I took the plunge, and I have replaced the NAIM CD and Flatcap2 with an updated version of the streaming DAC with internal hard drive as the source in my primary home. I am getting the same effect. I still don’t know, but I think there is now compelling evidence that something is different, and that is with tracks I really like.
Put that another way, I play tracks where I know every note. There are some tracks that sound just fine; just as I remember them; and there are others where I can hear things that I am absolutely certain have sounds that I have never heard before. It is invariably lower-volume sounds within the track, but there are timpani sounds and cymbals and other low-level stuff too. I think I must emphasise that this is not a consequence of a listening session where I want to listen to the hifi. I get the revelations even when playing a few tracks to accompany my tea and porridge. It happens when I want the music, not a critical analysis, but somehow what emerges from the speakers is not quite what my mind-map expects. Frankly, I couldn’t be more pleased. I am happily reverting to the status known as contentment.
My conclusion is to bid a fond and profoundly grateful farewell to the CD5 and Flatcap 2 and to say that my own experience is that NAIM got that product absolutely right, and their predilection for excellent power supplies is no gimmick. Farewell to the NAIM boxes, which have been my source of contentment for twenty-two years. I wish you all contentment with great products from a sensible manufacturer.