Nova PE?
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It seems to be made for this market requirement
Yes, I think I agree and both my main and office setups are 2-box (Atom HE + Nait 50 in the office) to maintain vinyl, full analogue throughput, SQ and flexibility with speakers.
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Exactly , but two boxes (without TT) are far easier to deal with than seven boxes (without TT)
May be slightly easier indeed!
Anyway, feels right to me.
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Stupid as it sounds, I really want an excuse to try the JBL one box streaming integrated. Just the pics make me happy to look at. But aside from no longer having the financial freedom of years past, I literally have more hifi bits than I have rooms to put hifis. But c’mon, isn’t this just a lovely looking Nova alternative?
I know you moved the Nova on due to the feeling of too much gap with the main system. I’ve played with building enough secondary systems to know that while the gap is real, pairing just the right speaker for the amp and room is critical to keeping lower end systems engaging. My own kitchen shoebox system also suffers from a mismatch but I know if I downgrade the speakers it can be fixed. The little TEAC is massively overmatched into PMC floorstanders.
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That is indeed lovely
Audio equipment should not only sound good , it should inspire with good design
Ian
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This amp/streamer from Yamaha has so many cues from the 1970s
The Technics amps look fantastic as well.
It (almost) makes you want to buy them just to look at…
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Stop it! I feel the need for a silver box with lots of toggle switches, dials and meters! Naim black boxes be damned. Sorry Richard, I’ll go and pay penance now (goes and reseats the DIN leads as punishment)
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This is why I have two other systems, both Japanese, silver, with VU meters. Using them gives me the warm and fuzzies.
The Naim system is big but tucked somewhere the eye has no reason to go. The others are small silver shoeboxes but on display.
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I don’t know what these current iterations of Japanese hifi sound like, but they just look really good. My local dealer stocks Accuphase, and that looks quality as well…
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The Technics amp IS fantastic.
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Each to their own. I think those 70s style boxes were hideous…. But then I associate getting shot of mine and getting my first ‘proper amp’ with going to the minimalist black box of a Rotel RA820(kind of a NAD3020 clone).
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My son has a Naim Star and a mail-order Ascend Acoustic bookshelf speaker and it absolutely rocks, plays CD’s and streams. I could easily live with it in a small place. Much more bass and cheaper than the system below.
Upstairs, I have a Nait50 into Proac Tab 10 Signatures. I use a Hugo TT2 as a front end for an MBP for Roon and directly for Bluetooth and Optical TV inputs. The HugoTT2 might be my last stop. This rig rocks in my office as I use it with TV and Laptop, and the Bluetooth gives me access to everything available on my phone. The Hugo also allows me to swap sources remotely, which the push-button Nait 50 will not allow.
Each of these systems will fit into the front seat of your car.
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I tend to agree… I can’t imagine any one wanting something like that in their living room, possibly their garage or shed perhaps yes.
I am not sure what the point of meters are in a domestic hifi amp… it harks back to a period in my mind of quantity over quality and bling… but I guess their product designers believe there is a demographic somewhere that wants such things… and the responses in this forum suggests they might be right.
There is nowt as strange as folk.
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I’ve seen people praising the Eversolo stuff as it can display twin VU meters…… What?
Well everyone has fairly strong preferences. I find the New Classic range to be the most hideous brutalist design imaginable but the response go the new range confirms that for most people Naim got it right.
What I like about silver with knobs is the singularity of purpose. The whole, I’m not an ornament, I’m a machine for making music and I’m happy to look like what I am can be appealing depending on the room. Not everyone has standard western living room. Some have industrial styles that definitely merge the line between garage and home.
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Not sure there is a ‘standard’ so called western living room. A typical living room looks quite different from a Swiss, French, or Austrian living room in my personal experiences, and a US living room looks even more different.
In fact I suspect industrial looking machines might fit better in the US than perhaps in Europe.
But I am not sure what the term ‘western’ means anymore… it originally came to describe Europe Christian values… but I think it’s outdated in so many contexts now other than a loose collective of general values.
Just adding a few pennies to the ‘looks’ discussion;
VU meters look ace, I have no issue with them on hifi gear at all, maybe this stems back to my teenage years when my father won a rather nice tape deck in a raffle at a posh dinner him and my mother attended. They always fascinated me watching the needles flicking up and down the scale as the music played.
The look of the New Classic range is also very much to my taste, very minimalist and stark, I find the 200 and 300 range very appealing.
However, the old classic range is not so appealing, I cannot explain why I just find the looks miss the mark aesthetically for me. But take me back to the older Naim boxes and they do hit the mark for me.
We are odd folk in what we like and dislike.
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Has anyone heard the Audiolab Omnia? Seems to offer great value now the price has halved to £799. I am considering downsizing my stack of a vintage Kenwood KA3020 amp and Marantz CD5004 with one for the office (I work from home).
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