Hi Peeps
I bought 4.5 metres of elderly Nac A5 off the bay recently, just to compare against the Witch Hat 3m lengths that Ive been using for about 8 years now.
I was always a bit concerned about the thinness of the Witch Hat stuff compared to A5, so jumped at the chance of a cheap second hand pair.
Obviously, I re terminated it and made sure they are exactly the same length before swapping them out.
And yes it deffo sounds better.
I do love a cheap upgrade!
Clive
Make sure they are both the right way round. 
So… you bought 4,5 metres lengths of NAC A5 - you have NAC52 with NAP 135’s - and you cut the A5 lengths down to 3 metres…??
On the older NAP’s , such as the 135’s and 250’s - Naim recommend a minimum length of 3,5 metres or A5 (or A4).
Hope I have misunderstood… 
Apparently Sir Alex Ferguson uses Naca5, he likes giving it the hairdryer treatment!
Sorry Ian. I re terminated the ends so they were a bit neater…kept them at 4.5m. I think the extra length plays a significant part of the improved SQ.
Clive
Where did you get that from ???
Maybe best to keep to FAQ info & avoid confusion (not that it makes a huge difference)
NACA5 info on FAQ and also what I measured in the past …
Capacitance: 16pF per metre
Inductance: 1uH per metre
Recommended minimum length for NACA5 is 3.5m.
Or if using another cable recommended minimum inductance is 3.5uH
Good. Glad I was wrong. Enjoy… 
More Metres Good For Naim.
(Its not a contest, but I have always used Naim leads of at least 7 metres. My A4 leads were 8 metres - it was a guess so they were not too short - and anyway A4 was £1-00 per metres back then…)
Old Naim forum screenshot.
Julian’s word is fine by me. 
No worries Ian.
How did you arrange 8m of cable?
Just interested
Well… my system rack is not between the speakers, so there is a couple of metres straight away. The run to the left speaker is the long one, so there is (with my now 7,5 m A5 leads) a maybe 1 metre loop…? The right speaker is closer, so its lead is looped up, under my LP12’s stand.
Not ideal - someone will be along shortly to tell me… But it works OK for me… 
(you can see the A5 run to the left speaker, going around the fake chimney breast - and if you look hard, both runs just to the right of the Black Telecaster)
Nice speakers…no doubt the coil police will be along shortly
Clive
Cheap Kudos - X3’s - now discontinued…
Bought ‘pre-loved’…
I bought X2 second hand as well. It was blind buy, I never heard them before, but the forum comments were nice and the price a little less then 1/3.
I’m having so much fun with them! Big surprise!
Now I keep looking for X3 
My X3’s came from my Naim dealer. They had just been traded in, for some bigger Kudos’s. So they were available…
I took them home to try - and they have been with me ever since…
Don’t care about numbers my post said it all.
Fine by Julian at the time fine by me.
Maybe if they had made better output stages in the amps they wouldn’t depend on wire length for balance.
Seems like that doesn’t matter now.
Skeptikal
I was thinking its odd that a manufacturer uses cables lengths (some quite long and unwieldy lengths at that)
to basically attenuate the speakers?
Clive
Hi
I agree but that’s how it is.
Not so with the newer gear but strange indeed.
It’s always been my opinion that the early Naim tech was really just high gain small PA or guitar practice type amps and they had held on to that
“ vintage ‘ technology until recently.
IMO.
The use of the cable length is not for attenuation. Its used to protect the output stages.
Solid state amplifier output stages can become unstable due to a speakers capacitive reactance that typically occures at very high frequencies above the audio band, this can be minor parasitic ringing up to full oscillation, but it affects the whole amp output range including the audio band.
Solid state amp designs have a zobel shunt circuit that is installed to stabilize the amp output stage. Problem is the zobel alone is not enough with reactive speakers and it requires a series inductor as part of the Zobel shunt circuit. This in addition to the speaker cable inductance can be too much & result in HF roll off.
Naim choose to use only the speaker cable to provide the correct inductance & avoid that possibility. Hence why it’s recommended to use 3.5m of NACA5 ( which has 1uH per meter) , what this is actually saying is the amp needs a 3.5uH series load to be part of the zobel output stage circuit.
I understand later Naim amps further counter this problem by limiting the preamp section output to the 20Hz-20kHz audio band.
