First time poster! I bought the Uniti Nova and Focal Kanta No. 2 bundle in December, and await delivery as soon as my home renovation, complete with a listening room/library, is complete in March. I have always wanted to get into high-end audio equipment, and this is my gateway drug, I think. I cannot wait.
The bundle I purchased comes with NAC A5, which I intend to route down through grommets into the cabinet on which my Nova will sit, down under the floor through a conduit and back up through floor grommets to the speakers (my wife doesn’t want speaker cables littering the floor, of course). I need to get the floor grommets ordered so that I can have my hardwood flooring contractor go ahead and put in the necessary holes for the grommets, as I want everything ready to go when my kit arrives. In order to do that I need to make sure that the grommets will have large enough openings to accommodate the NAC A5 speaker wires, which appear quite substantial. There are actually quite a few options for floor grommets, I have discovered!
Could anyone with a set please let me know what the width and thickness of the NAC A5 cable are? Thank you very much.
Be aware that the cables will have the pins soldered at 90°, and that you won’t know exactly where the speakers will be positioned until you have listened to them in your room. It would be a mistake to constrain their positioning. I’d suggest running the cables above the flooring for maximum flexibility. If you don’t like the black or the white, there are plenty of cables that come in brown and which will be more discreet.
Naim may be supplying right angled plugs at the amp end, but I presume not at the speaker end, where they may use regular bananas, spades, or even bare wire connections.
Either way, I would at least leave the cable loose on the floor for initial setup of the speakers, and only bury it once the final position is decided. Guessing at what’s going to work might easily result in getting it wrong and having to start again, which is going to be messy if it involves making holes in the floor.
Well at least that will make them a little easier to pull through conduit, although I still think it would be a mistake to prepare the route until the whole system is up and running.
How strange. The old warning is still on the back of the Nova. One wonders why it’s still there if Naim themselves ignore it. It’s clearly a case of do as I say rather than do as I do.
I reckon it’s a nonsense required by safety legislation in North America and doesn’t actually apply anywhere else in the world.
The cover story of needing to match metals between plug and socket is a convenient way to cover that up, despite that gold is still as inert as it ever was.
I know. Even Naim’s own Super Lumina has banana plugs. It’s just mildly amusing to think that the speaker cables packaged as part of the Nova deal directly contradict the label on the Nova itself.
Thank you all for these responses. You have given me a few things to to think about. I do think the bundle description mentioned that the cables would be terminated in the right-angle plugs on the speaker end and regular straight banana plugs on the amp end, but certainly I will confirm that I can snake the cable one direction or the other! I was thinking of putting the grommets about where the speakers would end up, but I like the recommendation to just wait until everything is in the space, set the speaker position with cables run across the room, and then cut the holes. Kinda like the old “measure twice, cut once” adage.
The right angle plugs are actually not great on the back of a Nova anyway. Unless the Nova is on a rack or the back of a cabinet, the bottom of the cables will clash with whatever the Nova is sitting on if it’s a flat surface. So banana plugs will give more options for locating the Nova on furniture.
If anything I would expect it to be the other way round with the Nova using right angled plugs. Some speakers have the right spacing between pins for the Naim right angled bananas, but I suspect the Kantas do not.
