I resisted the Fraim for years. I had a highly rated US Arcici Airhead rack and had squeezed my whole front end system onto it. The Fraim upgrade made a spectacular improvement. With a friendly dealer, you can buy most of it ex-demo and swap out the vertical pieces as needed. It will be easy to sell when you need to move it on. This falls into the “Just Do It” category. The more boxes you have the better the improvement.
I’ve tried all sorts of racks including Quadraspire Q4 and SVT, Hutter, Isoblue, and a basic Hifi Racks - which was particularly dreadful, and the Fraim is significantly better than all of them. If you can accommodate it I’d strongly recommend it. Given the current rack and the fact that there is a large central speaker sending vibrations to the Naim boxes on which huge efforts have been made by Naim to avoid vibration, I suspect you’ll get a really big improvement. If you can get a Fraim to the side and just have the AV stuff between the speakers, that would be ideal.
I’d also try running the Naim without the Isotek as conditioners rarely improve things and usually make them worse. Dedicated mains in the new location would be a very good idea.
Now the replies have flooded in do you have the positive reinforcement you were looking for?! Seriously, I can’t imagine you getting anyone who’s forked out the not inconsiderable amounts to admit to it actually making little difference. You have to remember you’re in the flat earth universe.
That looks like a John Austin rack. I sold a few in my time. They’re rubbish though. I don’t want that taken the wrong way. I just don’t have a more eloquent way to say it.
I’m sure Fraims are good, but so many things about Naim have me scratching my head since I started following this forum.
We have a manufacturer that by common consent makes some of the best audio gear going, and charges accordingly. But then the message is ‘sure it’s good, but it won’t work properly unless…’, and then we’re invited to buy specialist racks for a shedload more money, and that unless we stack things in the right order not just top to bottom but left to right as well it still won’t perform. And if we don’t buy the correct mains leads we may as well grab something in Currys. Now it turns out that just connecting to your network isn’t good enough, we need a specific random switch to extract its potential, and without some ridiculous CAT387E [is that where we are now…?] you’re still chasing shadows.
The analogy is usually with high performance cars. Yes, we’re buying Ferraris. But we’re buying road-going Ferraris that really shouldn’t need their own dedicated road surface and only run on unicorn fuel, not a F1 car that I’d readily accept needs a bit more looking after.
For the money I’ve invested in a 300DR, 272 + 555PS and nice Atacama rack to stand it on, I want to be confident that it’s doing itself justice, not find out that it never stops and that for 20 grand I can’t expect it to achieve its potential out of the box. Is it beyond Naim to produce something that just works and isn’t so dependent on minute differences in its environment?
I was about to go full fat fraim for a Nova, but instead had a Sound Org table, bloody good.
For me the criteria was living space aesthetics the Fraim ticks them all, but the price is
Naim only recommend Fraim, it’s not compulsory. It is hideously expensive and I would have needed two stacks to accomdate my box count so I bought a double width Atacama for about 1/4 of the price of Fraim.
I can only do cable dressing from the front so the compactness of Fraim makes it very difficult to do the same.
The fancy switches and network cables are just what people go on about on here, Naim just suggest a Nergear domestic switch. And you could easily be convinced that without a 2960 and an Audioquest Wonga cable that your system is little better than a transistor radio.
Your Ferrari example is a good one really. It’s probably quite sensitive to different fuels and tyre pressure for example. So where as a Piglet 3008 Diesel would have the same dynamics regardless you’d notice a 2psi difference in tyre pressure on a Ferrari.
Naim kit is sensitive to mains leads and microphony.
It does ‘just work’ and you can plonk it on the floor and it will ‘just work’. If you get various bits and pieces such as a good stand it will work a bit better, that’s all. It would be pretty well impossible to develop hifi that is totally impervious to its environment.
Take the 272, 555 and 300. It costs the best part of £20,000. If people are happy to plonk it on a really basic rack, put it on a built in shelf, or sit it on the floor then that’s fine. If they want to buy a Fraim, fancy wires or whatever in order to get the very best from their £20,000 of black boxes then that’s fine too.
There is no value in people banging on about how clever they are for buying a basic rack, putting it on a shelf or sticking it in a unit between their speakers, as if saying that somehow those buying a Fraim are wasting money or are a bit soft in the head. This isn’t about one way being better than another. It’s simply about making choices. The way I look at this, and it’s what Naim would say too, is that the Fraim is just another part of the system on an equal footing with the black boxes. Why is it that people will happily drop £7,000 on a 555PS and then balk at £3,000 on a Fraim? It really doesn’t make sense.
I must admit i was sceptical until i tried a Fraim, no going back now. I picked up most of mine second hand, the top tier on each side is new, overall less than half price.
Fully agree, which is why I didn’t say that. I asked why Naim make kit that is apparently hyper-sensitive to environmental differences. I read this thread hoping to find out - it’s given me some pointers tbh, but I don’t think I’d buy a Fraim unless a dealer was happy to loan me one for a few weeks and the difference was justifiable.
Because it’s not clear what a 3 grand Fraim offers over my £800 Atacama, and dealers I’ve dealt with haven’t mentioned that it’s not enough just to buy the black boxes.
I was making a casual observation that for all Naim’s qualities it’s a bit dispiriting to go a fair way down this path only to find that a lot more investment is needed because without it there’s always the nagging thought in the head that it could be performing better.