Naim Audio Brochure from the 70s

Be interesting to see how that turns out for you. I was seriously considering some open baffle speakers from Decware at one time. Their power handling is far far below what anything except a Nait50 or Atom offer though.

Are you thinking of conventional drivers in open baffle or single driver full range open baffle?

Thanks for sharing! I hadn’t seen or read this brochure until now.

Even better if someone with a scanner has this brochure, and could generate a scanned PDF version of it.

Very nice,thanks for sharing !
I think this must be of later date than -84,as it shows the Nap 135´s.

And no NAP160.

The NAC62 would indicate it’s from late '87 to '88. This was when the Chrome Bumper 62 was introduced and only lasted for a short time before being updated to Olive the following year.

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Hi FZ

To avoid thread drift, I’ll answer you on this OB thread:

For reference - here is a picture of my NAC62 - made in 1988.

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I used to have a 1989 model of that one. Wired for North America !

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Oooh, that looks nice and clean 8)

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But it’s a Preamp,shouldn’t need special wiring ?

Found this on a famous Japanese auction site:

With Apple Translate (without modifications):

‘The original purpose of audio amplifiers is to drive speakers with as little information loss of music as possible. In the view of Name Audio, I don’t think that the pursuit of characteristics such as broadband and low gravity is unconditionally the best direction, and I think it is easy to fall into the design that is prone to information loss of music. Dynamic characteristics, open-loop bandwidth, through-late, transmission delay, stable operation margin, etc. are part of the many factors that Name Audio attaches importance to, and at the same time, those characteristics are balanced without one side. Is thinking about a more important issue.

NAC32/NAP250

A combination of the highest quality sevarret amplifiers’

‘The original purpose of audio amplifiers is to drive speakers with as little information loss of music as possible. Look at the name audio

In terms of the solution, I do not think that only characteristic water such as wide area and low gold standard is unconditionally the best direction, but rather it is easy to fall into circuit design that is prone to music information loss. Dynamic characteristics such as cain be-be-dance, open-loop bandwidth, through-late, transmission avoidance, stable operation margin, etc. are part of the many factors that Name Audio attaches importance to. At the same time, it is better to balance those characteristics without one side. I think it’s a more important issue.

It is a small, high-performance pre-main amplifier that condenses the technology proven in Naim NAC32 and NAP250 into this size. The strength and thickness of the tight sound image and harmony drive the European speakers beautifully.’

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The good ol’ days when Naim let you know the size of transformers they were using! It confirms my belief that you need at least 200VA before really hitting hi fi. I didn’t know they put a larger transformer in the NAP 135s. 75W from a 500VA transformer isn’t really asking a lot, especially with just one channel to drive. They must all have had very easy lives and it’s an incredibly lavish decision for the 1980s, but we know it paid off in spades. I can’t imagine any other audio company’s management not vetoeing that decision and saying they could make do with the old 400VA transformer (and get more buying power, too).

I agree. It was actually a golden age, if rather too cultish (see the emphasis on single speaker dem rooms, which was unscientific tosh - which is not to say that a wall of speakers was ever a good idea). I sometimes wonder where we’d be now, especially with amplifier design, if we hadn’t been reminded to actually listen to what we were buying.

Was the NAC 62 meant to sit below the 32 or 32.5, or was it meant to have comparable performance? And what’s the general consensus today, perhaps also in relation to the NAC 72 as well?

Single speaker dem rooms was a requirement for getting a Linn or Naim (and later BADA I think, I’m not sure) dealer agreement.

But I noticed that dealers basically tossed it out the window when surround sound became mainstream and it was just unworkable. Though good dealers still only have one stereo pair on the main wall. After all, you can only position one pair correctly anyway.

I admit I was pretty much down the dogma rabbit hole right to the point I stopped I working in retail and for a decade beyond. And nearly all that dogma began in the UK in the 70s. But I was very young and at that time, that dogma yielded great results.

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Me too! I can’t believe the crap I believed. Some of it I even doubted at the time but I shelved my doubts, thinking that people who made hi fi this good must know more than I did. Naim kept their feet more on the ground and indulged less in the “magick” which, I think, resulted in them hanging onto more of the qualities their products possessed - for a quite startlingly long time. It was basically hypnosis and cult adherence. Although we did get some great products, what was sad about this era was that we lost companies with real expertise like Peter Walker’s Quad and the KEF of the Laurie Fincham and Andrew Jones era. Absurdly, people thought Linn knew more about speakers than KEF did, which was like comparing a veteran professional with a kid who’d just picked up a soldering iron. Things were a little more complicated on the amplifier side because the Quad 405 current dumping idea didn’t actually work (though we’d have to wait for simulation software like LTspice to prove that) and was philosophically a very poor structure anyway. Julian really did do us a favour there when we remember that Peter Walker really didn’t believe that any amplifiers sounded different one from the other. This was a very odd state of affairs since PW probably knew 10x what Julian did, and seems to have had that rare ability to read circuits like Alonso can read a race. I suspect, knowing his own limitations, Julian set about working things out from first principles, looking for things that could be sub-optimal and that other designers might have missed. This shows up in his grounding schemes (which may well have been a first, showing that much care) and in recognising the need for decent power supplies, though this was almost a necessity given the lousy PS rejection of those single rail preamps - just 6dB PSR, though tbf, that was probably true of an awful lot of pre-s at the time as they nearly all used single rails. But what he did was listen to these changes and was therefore in a position to rank the differences, and that’s what truly set him apart. Nowadays, not a single amplifier designer of note would dream of not listening to their product as it was developed and the idea of listening to it only when it was finished would now be regarded as comical.

The NAC62 was the replacement for the NAC42.5. It was a more affordable than the NAC32.5 and NAC72 but was a bit simpler - facility for only one set of interchangeable input cards, the rest of the circuitry on the main board rather than on daughter boards.

Julian used to say that the shoe-box amps generally performed at a similar level, but offered different levels of facilities. Sample variance was somewhat wider back then too, and age and use/abuse will have added even more variability. I have had many shoe-box pre-amps and still have a couple of 42.5s, a CB NAC62, and a couple of NAC32.5s. Of these, the worst performer is one of the 32.5s, and the best is a close run thing between the other 32.5, one of the 42.5s, and the NAC62. I’d probably just give the nod to the second 32.5 as it was later updated with time aligned boards so is closer to a NAC72 (but unlike that pre-amp retains the all-important mono switch). The NAC72 is king of the shoe-box pre-amps, but only if you have a good one…

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It was a 42.5 with added input if memory serve.
They were great preamps and easy to get going now after decades.
I believe the half width preamps gets more and more valuable, indeed CB seem to increase.

After a short “get used to period”, my serviced 62 is no slouch against my 282.

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Thanks for the detailed reply. I’ve never been quite sure, and that uncertainty got worse with some of the great reports about the NAC 62 on here. That variance can be quite alarming with the preamps particularly, especially with age and treatment, as you say. I’ve had a 32 (in an old style box with the thinner panels like the 12) off eBay that completely lacked the magic of my CB 32 and which I rather foolishly let go for pennies as a result. I wouldn’t do the same today as I know its all easily rescuable, sometimes with just a bit of a clean. I also let go of a 12 for similar reasons, though not as bad, and I’d like that one back too! :grinning: That one is doubly annoying because I was already of the view that there wasn’t much between the 12 and the 32 but I convinced myself that view must have been mistaken rather than thinking it was probably down to age and a bit of wear and tear.

It’s very strange to have got rid of the mono switch when it’s so easy to do and all the connections are right in that same area. Was there a reason that I’m missing? If there’s a part I’d like to get rid of, it would be the balance control.

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