Focal Powered by Naim Store @Melbourne

Anyone in Melbourne here…?

Is this store new..? Or an old A2A store..?

Seems to be the only listing on the Retailers page of the Naim website for Australia (indeed Oceania) now….

SC

On their website

premiumsound dot com dot au

click on blog, which reveals some history of the company

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Thanks for that.

Yeah, I did look earlier on Google and it looked as if Premium Sound had had a facelift when I looked at the store address…

Nice to see Naim sold alongside Sonos and B&O….

Seems Mark Raggett made the jolly down under…

Takes the pi*s a bit to say it’s the first Focal Powered By Naim store in Australia – ALL the A2A stores had that blazoned across the windows…! :thinking: Focal/VerVent doing their look the other way trick again…! :roll_eyes:

So, Perth next then…! :rofl: :person_gesturing_no:
SC

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Sorry hope this doesn’t offend to many–

I’d prefer it if Focal could be powered by another amp-vendor :ninja:

I just read through that blog piece – god, what bllocks are written for such things.
They wax lyrically for a paragraph or two on the virtues of the room treatment in their new listening space for the Diva – why, aren’t they supposed to feature active tuning for your room (ADAPT)…? Not much of a advert for the new lifestyle speakers if they require extensive room treatment still…! :thinking:
I know it was essentially a launch event for the Diva speakers (which Ok, have Naim amps inside) but I don’t see any Naim black boxes in any of the evening’s pics…

SC

Your question is answered in the second sentence on the page your yourself linked.

Why the negativity? Why try to create an issue out of nothing?

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I didn’t see that (thankyou for pointing out) but my initial wonder was whether indeed it was a ‘new’ store as all the previous A2A stores had in fact been labelled/branded as ‘Focal Powered By Naim’ …I missed it was a rebranded ‘zone’ of an existing dealer…

I wasn’t being negative at all, certainly not initially….As I posted, it does raise the eyebrows to claim it’s the first FPbN store in Australia – see attached pics of the ‘previous’ stores….
Nice, for sure, to have a new official store here, though not much help to me being 3,400km away!…Still, can live in hope.

I appreciate it’s probably hard to fully appreciate the irk that end users have experienced (do experience) here in Australasia…..Are you headed this way any time soon Nigel…?

SC

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I’ve flown to New York just once, I never want to fly long haul again and don’t plan to fly short haul either. The whole carbon footprint thing just makes it feel wrong. That said Mrs HH wants to go to Quebec, so I may have to make an exception.

Interestingly, I read yesterday that the average domestic boiler emits as much CO2 as seven flights, so as we have cut off our gas I may be able to justify it!

I’m sure there are wonderful aspects to Australia but we have so much history and culture in Europe that’s easily accessible by road or train that I just don’t have a desire to go.

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I hear you.
Australia – pros and cons, pros and cons. Much like most countries at the end of the day. I’m a citizen of both, so I guess that states how I feel….

Carbon footprint, such a grey area, imho. I’m in no way doubting the Carbon impact of the aero industry….but just where and how hard do you draw the line across any/all human impact….
I once read there’s well over 3km of electrical wiring in an EV – yet no one seems to mention where does that copper all come from…and where does the leccy all come from to charge it all…and all the Lithium in the batteries (not to mention Cobalt – I have a good photojournalist friend who has worked extensively in Congo and seen the impact up close) in all the devices we use ever increasingly daily……It goes on and on.
I guess as individuals we just have to make choices and positions that we are comfortable with or accept….but, personally, I see a lot of grey areas and red herrings amongst it all……

I’m sure Australia could be ‘powered’ from just Solar, Wind and the thousands of Km of coastline…yet it holds steadfast to coal, even above Nuclear….There’s even complaint of ‘too much’ household Solar uptake and the impact it has feeding back in to the grid – really?! How can you win….

Anyway, a whole other discussion…! I apologise, to myself, for the thread diversion…!

SC

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It’s worth digging into the background of those stats. As ever it’s not quite that simple. At the basic level, the boiler is per home (say typically 2 - 4 individuals) whereas the flight data is per head.

@S.C
Surround Sounds in Nedlands WA are still Naim Dealers are they not?

Yes, I realised that. So with an average of three people the boiler is the equivalent of two flights each.

Yes, they are…I didn’t say otherwise. But their main area of commerce is high-end custom/smart install…and I also don’t have a AU$1.5 mil Yacht…! :rofl:

I’ve known and used them since 2012 or so (in fact I ordered and got the very first Mu-so Gen 1 to arrive in WA from them)…As I’ve said in another current thread (and in the past) Andrew is great, but they are not really somewhere to go and ‘demo’ and browse the Naim range…They ‘can get boxes’ if you know what I mean…

For all the messy fall-out, the previous A2A ‘Focal Powered by Naim’ stores did offer something more than that…Hence my interst in this new store. Will be interesting to see if more arrive across the country…

SC

Last time I went in Surround Sounds a couple of years ago, they had a demo room with Naim gear in it, but I agree not to the same scale or choice as A2A in Subiaco when they were Naim Dealers.

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But happy to tow a plastic box a 1000km to France and back?

Martin

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Yep - basically a round trip to NY. Sorry - I’m sure you realised that but I get cross when statistics comparing apples with pears are published as in the article you read. (It also makes me question the rest of the assumptions and data underlying the statistic published).

Sorry to disappoint, but we sold the caravan a few years ago. Yes we will be going to France three times by road this year, but at least our car is now electric, and yes I know about cobalt, lithium and all the rest. One of the reasons we chose Renault is their work towards sustainability on these metals, though of course nothing is perfect, more like the least worse.

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Which is Australia pic, which is Portugal?

From Wiki:

“ The additional environmental cost of transporting these batteries results in a higher carbon footprint than internal combustion engine vehicles. A 2021 study comparing emissions from electric vehicles and vehicles with internal combustion engines found that 46% of carbon emissions from electric vehicles come from the production process, while for an internal combustion engine vehicle they only account for “than” 26%. Nearly 4 tonnes of CO2 are released during the production process of a single electric car and, to break even, the vehicle must be used for at least 8 years to offset the initial emissions by 0.5 tonnes of CO2. emissions avoided each year.”

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Yes, the more they are driven the better the figures look, as the per km saving offsets the higher production emissions. There is a good short article here. Our house runs on green electricity and in the summer we will charge the car from the solar panels, so the break even time should be as short as possible.

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