I’m coming back to Naim!
That’s the good news. The more difficult part is that I’m going to be going all olive, and I would really like not to have a completely mismatched system colour-wise, but will obviously be buying on eBay or remote dealers to get the required bits and bobs…
So, is there any way to tell, e.g., by serial number/year, what shade of olive a piece of equipment will be? I need to initially match up 102, hicaps, 250… but the list will grow!
Many thanks to all.
I recall the older Olive being more murky duck pond and the later serial numbers numbers being a nice cleaner and greener olive.
I can’t recall the years but suspect late nineties onwards would be the new Olive ( which in my view is much nicer!)
I’m sure others can chip in and be more precise.
The classic stuff is at very reasonable prices now and to my ears provides a more consistent sound to olive but some still prefer the olive so each to their own - either way factor in the cost of a service.
Gary
No way to tell I’m afraid to say. Naim used to offer a colour matching service for fascias back in the Olive days so you can get the whole range from brown-olive to grey-olive, whatever the year. You just have to go with whatever you can find.
Thanks.
Yes, I too prefer the less browny olive - like my NAC72… So later is like this, good to know!
All will either be bought serviced, or sent straight off to Naim or Class A (who are Naim approved).
Ah, so you mean that people used to get Naim to match to earlier gear, so there will be later gear which is still brown-olive?
Ay mama! That makes it so much harder…
Why was getting consistent colour so hard for Naim, anyway? Did they forget to specify the paint codes on the original models, or something?
The story I was told was that the person at the fascia supplier who mixed up the colour left (or died) and didn’t keep any notes on the mix, so the supplier would just hold back an example from each batch as a colour reference. Throughout many, many batches the colour started to drift slightly to the point where it soon became clear that the colour was quite different to what it had been originally.
Crikey, the good old days 
Sort of makes me like it even more, in a weird way.
Ive 3 boxes of olive, 72/hc/140 with similar seriel numbers that had 3 very different colours. Personally I liked the variation but I’d assume you will get colour differences.
Thank you, good to know.
By the way, does anyone know how Naim achieve the green “3D” glow effect round the lit logo? Is there a gap around the black logo in the Olive layer of paint, or something??
Yes. I share your concern on matching the colors. Serial numbers above 130000 approximately are the grayish green shade. Below that they are typically more earthy. I do think serial numbers in the 120000 to 130000 range can go either way.
Thanks that’s really helpful 
Here’s my stash :
NAT03 1993 90xxx grey olive
NAXO 2-4 1994 96xxx brown olive
Flatcap 1994 102xxx grey olive
SNAXO 2-4 1995 116xxx brown olive
NAHA, CDX, CD3.5 NAC 102, NAC82, NAP250s, Hicaps, Supercaps & NAHA are all post 1998 147xxx and are all grey olive, which fits in nicely with @snarfy’s notes above.
NAXO & SNAXO are the only brown-olives. Coincidence?
Thanks, very helpful.
This brings up something I’d wondered about - presumably the colour change serial numbers will be different for different components, depending on the volume of sales?
Perhaps more Naxo and Snaxo’s were made and sold so the changeover is slightly later? Or maybe more of these were marched to earlier components when made for some reason?