Hello, everyone! Merry Christmas! I have a big problem, both mid-frequency speakers are wheezing((( Is it possible to buy or repair them somewhere? I found nothing in Germany, there was only one hope for this forum. I can’t imagine that my NBL will have to be thrown away just because of this breakdown. It seems to me that the problem is that the ring in the centre of the speaker has narrowed a little and therefore touches the central rod that is stationary. This probably happened because the acoustics had been unemployed for more than a year.
Welcome Nik.
The NBLs are long out of production and indeed, Naim have not made any drivers or speakers for a good many years now. You may get lucky and find that they have a set of mids in stock, but that may well be a long shot. Have you contacted your dealer to find out?
Otherwise, you could first try turning the drivers upside down (turning through 180 degrees) to see whether any sag evens out. However, if the drivers are “blown” then a full on repair may be necessary, which is not so simple without the necessary parts, personnel or facilities at Naim. Beyond that you could look to a drive unit repair specialist to see whether they can effect a repair - a quick google search brings up a number of repair specialists in the UK that might well be worth contacting.
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Hi Nik_Nakone
Please do a search on the forum on “DBL refurbishment”. The DBL and NBL use the same midrange driver. One of the DBL owners met Scanspeak to see if they had a driver that might be a suitable replacement. They suggested the Scanspeak 15W/4424G00 MIDWOOFER - DISCOVERY RANGE.
They did a bit of trimming of the edges to get it to fit. Now how it works with the passive crossover I couldn’t tell you. The drivers aren’t expensive - about £45 each.
Best of luck, hopefully you don’t need to change the driver.
Karl
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Hi Nik
Welcome here. Unfortunately not an easy endeavor. The DBL and NBL mid drivers being essentially identical turn out to be a true Achilles heel in maintaining those legacy speakers. You might be lucky to somewhere source a pair of spare drivers forgotten somewhere on a shelf, but wouldn’t hold my breath. As they were more or less naim in house built there is also no driver company around willing to take responsibility and do a refurb. You might try the path delft pointed out with these scan speak drivers I found having visited scan speak with my Dbl top last summer. At least in a side by side measurement they seem to have a very similar phase response as the original dbl mids. But I don’t know how they perform in real life. I really wish you good luck
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Another option (long shot) might be to keep an eye on the usual auction sites and the pink fishy place for a secondhand pair. You might find some with tatty cabinets from which you could rescue and re-home the drivers.
The alternative solution, being replacement, wouldn’t be cheap as the NBL punches well above its weight.
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The reality is there are just not that many out in the wild.
Looks at own nbls nervously…
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Scan-Speak Discovery 15W/4424G00
Thank you all so much for the advice! I bought these speakers, connected them to try and the result exceeded all expectations! I sent the original speakers to the master for repair, and I put these for a while. I didn’t expect such a good sound immediately out of the box, I’m sure when they work for 100 hours, it will become much better.
Nik, is that a Eumig FL-1100?
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Which ‘master’ are you referring to here?
I assume you’ve inserted the Scan-Speak units as a temporary measure?
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Yes, but I am very pleased with the time result.
I apologise for my English, I use Google when translating. My knowledge of the language is very small.
FL-1000, It’s a great cassette deck!
Your English is better than my Russian!
Can you advise where, and to whom, you have sent the original drivers, please?
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Yes please tell us more about who and how they fitted the Scanspeak midrange drivers. Your experience gives us all great hope. Well done and thanks for contributing to our knowledge!
I sent them to Russia, St. Petersburg. I was assured that he was a specialist with “golden hands”. He watched the video with my speakers and immediately said, send it, I’ll do it. When I get the dynamics back, I’ll report the result here.
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I didn’t do anything special, the speakers came up. I think I’ll cut them a little later to give them a square shape. Now they are a little more than necessary, look at the photo.
How do they sound now compared to when you had them with the original midrange?
Now there are very big images. It seems that giants are singing. I think this is due to the fact that the acoustics do not stand on the spikes and the speakers should work for 100 hours. I haven’t heard this acoustics with native speakers at home. I had SBLs, and I only heard NBL from a friend. Before that, I had a system entirely from Audio Note, AN-E Lexus Signature acoustics and now works with ASR Audio, but I want NBL. Audio Note acoustics for lamp amplifiers, ASR is very powerful for it.
Fantastic, that gives all NBL and DBL owners hope for the future. Somebody may be able to help you with the recommended torque settings to tighten the midrange driver.
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Good to hear that these scan speak drivers (15W/4424G00) we found may actually perform up to the task. As you can see the ones I brought with me have been cut to fit the cabinet better. But so far I have not dared to try them.
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I read that you were in Germany to test the speakers. Could you tell me exactly where? I live near Stuttgart myself. Is it a company that produces speakers?