Bottom two - there are going to be two stacks - so a pair of bases first, a pair of standards, a pair of mediums, then it’s standards all the way.
Dreading it already.
The instructions are SO poor… 
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You’ll have it assembled in an hour 
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and re-assembled by the days end. 
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Seems obvious, but I found it so much easier, having built and levelled the base units, to add the black boxes as I went, with cables already in place.
Much less backbreaking than trying to introduce heavy boxes into a completed frame and then connect the cables.
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Once you get 1 or 2 down it’s pretty easy. “cut and paste”
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Its an easy job, nothing to worry about
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That’s exactly what I’m thinking of doing - just makes sense!
Fingers crossed that all the right bits are in the boxes!! Good luck.
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I’m used to laying 6 inch conquer blocks in hundreds of footings. Water off a duck’s back… 
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Just no way would this have been possible without building the thing around it…
…final levelling will be the challenge, but we will cross that bridge!
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Yes I don’t understand how anyone could contemplate doing it any differently.
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Matt - might be the light but the left upright below the 500 looks like it needs twisting round a bit so it’s absolutely flush with the veneer. If so best to do it now before you add more levels.
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Looks stunning already Matt. Great choice the all black in your room 
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AFAIK, Naim are the only high end company that uses glass shelves. Glass is really resonant, tap it and it rings like a bell. I’m guessing that Naim uses all these balls and cups and bits to quell the resonances.
Other high end companies use aluminum and wood or constrained-Layer designs and composites. SRA , Grand Prix, Solid Steel, Box Furniture, Symposium, Finite Elemente. All use various different approaches.
MDF is used in speaker cabinets mainly for its non resonate properties, it’s dense and doesn’t ring. There’s also HDF, and Baltic Birch Plywood. Along with Carbon Fibre, and even more exotic materials. Like the stuff Wilson uses; and of course Aluminum like Magico, and YG use.
I’m sure I’ve read that they originally wanted use Aluminium sheets but getting it absolutely flat is very difficult. And expensive. Fraim costs enough as it is so glass was the next best thing.
I understand the resonance is meant to be there to wick away the energy. Try taping the aluminium case work on most Naim products and you will hear that familiar ring.
Indeed, it was a big and extensive R&D project coming up with the Fraim. From experience with other racks, glass was not expected to work as well as it did. It was a close run thing between the two best - perfectly flat aluminium plates or the Pilkington supplied glass finally chosen. Naim went for the glass mainly because it looked great and the perfectly flat aluminium plates are very difficult to make to the required ultra-fine tolerance, and are thus very expensive and supply in such quantity, not so easy. They are still used though in the factory; they’re essential for levelling the feet on the metal foot equipped kit - even glass is not perfectly flat to the required tolerance. And of course similar plates had to be used on the interface plates of the SL2s in order for the defined gap to properly act as a seal between the two boxes - they both had to be perfectly flat for it to work.
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