That the Covid version?
Interesting topic, but surely we need to know more than who does the voicing, what he listens to and what he has for breakfast. He might be ruling on a new power amplifier but you cannot hear that as a single box. What is the source, what are the speakers? To hear what he hears, you surely have to match everything?
I hope there is a succession plan …
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For me, the aging of hearing is a misnomer. I have always maintained that if one is regularly going to live concerts, that is the reference. So making your music system duplicate what you think live music sounds like gives an excellent reference. So as one’s ears age to live music, so do they to reproduced music. As we say in the instrumentation field, “its a common mode effect” relative to live music.
Hopefully Roy has listened to lots of live music, and continues to do so, there should be very little aging apparent, as long as the products are voiced to sound like the real thing. Covid aside.
Certainly true of classical concerts and concerts with mostly acoustic instruments, but I must admit there are a few more rock related concerts and stadium concerts that I’ve been to where the quality is lost. That might be partly down to not being able recreate the production quality you can add to a CD compared to live. I remember reading that even when you hear a live concert on a CD, many parts of the instruments are re-done as they make many more mistakes when playing live. Also I love the bass in a live concert, but that may be too much for me at least at home.
Now I’m not saying any of this as a bad thing, just a difference that you cant (and may not want to) replicate in a 4x6 meter living room.
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I’ve wondered if these golden ears stories are mostly marketing fluff because with age you hear less of high frequencies so that would lead to more and more bright sounding equipment.
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Not sure how much difference it makes for listening tests if you can’t hear 15K.
- First of all, they don’t manipulate the frequency curves of amps based on hearing. This one is easy, it must be flat and always is. The listening tests are for other things.
- In any case, these very high frequencies are always “just” harmonics. The piccolo flute’s base frequency peak is around 5K, pipe organs e.g. may go to c’’’’’’’’, a bit over 4K.
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Before I got into Naim. I always read that naim amps like to work hard, have a limited bandwidth at both extremes and because of regulated driving hard of a simple array of capacitors - need servicing more szooner than other designs from other marques.
The roll-off in frequency response at the extremes is certainly true. I can’t comment on the veracity of the other claims, though the part about “driving capacitors” seems at least dodgy wording. It might be referring to Naim not putting output transistors in parallel for better timing (Statement excluded) and the therefore nominally less impressive wattage numbers compared to others.
Whether any of this affects service intervals (or what it has to do with the topic of the thread 
) I don’t know either, but I’d choose a better sounding system that needs a service every 12 years over a worse-sounding one that doesn’t
Edit: all in all it reads like the misunderstood half-truths that are commonly told about Naim stuff, similar to the legend that Naim is unable to make a power amp independent of the speaker cable properties - when in fact they of course could if they wanted to
Same as when one goes to a live concert and cannot hear above 15K. See my comments above about a common mode effect.
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Same as when one goes to a live concert. Same ears. Same less high frequencies. Its a common mode effect–as long as one is trying to duplicate the sounds heard live.
It was a polite turn of phrase
I could understand live as being In the rehersal room hearing instruments with nothing colouring the output. But a live concert with a 10kW speaker system and 20k persons is not a target I hope. That’s just being drunk and having fun. 
Both “sound like live concert” and “golden ears” give me headaches really. Marketing.
My post of course was tongue-in-cheek! Your explanation makes every sense. However, if the voicing was done solely by one or more people who are suffering from normal age-related hearing loss, as in drop-off of high frequencies, there would be a risk that through trying to get it to sound as good as it can, or even accidentally, the highest frequencies could end up being boosted disproportionately. But I assume other people are also involved, and I would expect measurements to be done somewhere along the line, so in reality the above scenario may be unlikely to occur
I get the impression that live purely acoustic, likely predominantly jazz, would be the reference,
I think the legend is that they don’t. They probably did at some point, but I refuse it to be true for any recent range. They sell SL in 2m lengths, I don’t believe Naim would do that if the 3.5m of NAC A5 would still hold (and some say 5-7m is ideal). You’d need 5m lengths of SL to equal the relevant properties of NAC A5, 10m in case of 7 for NAC A5.
That may be the case as well. You would have to ask Richard as he still says that they don’t, if I understood him correctly. Point being, there are lots of such half-truths about Naim that are told in magazines (more so in the past) and forums.
Edit: and I think his FAQ on this very forum says 5-10 m is ideal
This assumes that more high frequency is better, which is not necessarily a correct assumption. It seems to me that the correct amount of high frequency content duplicates what the instruments sound like. Too much high frequency will not sound right to someone who is familiar with what instruments sound like. Of course, I am talking of either classical un-amplified music, not rock or heavily amplified and equalized entertainment.
I have been to some concerts, where the sound was not within 10 db of what I have heard on the cd’s or streams from the same group. That would not be a good reference. I assume Roy has a good basis. If he did not, then Naim would not be a sound that may folks like and aspire to.
No I wasn’t suggesting that more HF was better - indeed anything more than the amount of hf in the recording is a negative outcome to my mind. What I meant was that without the other checks that I assume exist there is a risk that if voicing is reliant upon people with reduced HF hearing sensitivity they might boost the hf to sound right to them, or if not boost they might not notice if it is boosted accidentally.
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But that is the point, if the person doing the voicing has a good basis of hearing what instruments sound like, he is matching that, so there is a small chance that the SQ would be boosted accidentally. Its probably a person with perfect pitch.
If additional persons who do not have a good basis for what instruments sound like, then sure its a possibility.