ND 555 in a non Naim system? Thoughts?

Wow!

Thank you so much for those photos.

What Moon amps are you using with the NDS?

A Sim Audio i5 integrated

I have recently replaced my NDS with the ND555 in a system comprised of the cj GAT2 pre/Karan Acoustic monos into Avalon Transcendents/twin REL subs- a major upgrade and sounds superb!

Wow! I bet that’s an awesome system. Thank you for sharing.

Not ND555 here but I have tried my NDX2 with a friend’s accuphasd E650.

No issue with pairing and they sounded good together. Hope this helps.

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Absolutely helps, a lot. I have a friend attending Axpona and he’s going to listen to a few dacs for me.

On a side note, it’s funny you mention the E650. Another friend is urging me to get one for my Duo XD. He has one (and a few other amps) with a pair of Mezzo XD and loves the combo.

Thank you for replying.

I almost bought a pair of Apogee Scintillas around 15 to 20 years ago, but was advised (just in time) that they would very likely fry the Primare 928 mono-blocks I was running at the time. The 928s were pretty robust so I can’t be sure that they wouldn’t have survived, but then virtually nothing other than a Krell amp could safely cope with the 1ohm impedance of the Scintillas.

I ended up buying a pair of Maggies instead, but I have always regretted not having owned a pair of Scintillas.

Hello Hmack

Sorry to hear that you never owned a pair of Scintillas. As the founder of Apogee Acoustics, and designer of the Full Range Ribbons and the Scintillas, I can let you in on a little history. In the Scintilla development, we we trying to reduce the cost of the product. This lead to the shorter height, slightly narrower midrange, to reduce the magnet volume and cost, and to gain back the sound volume, we considered going to one ohm. We surveyed the top dozen amplifier manufacturers at the time and they said it would be no problem for their amp. So we implemented One ohm taps. It worked great. No amps blew up. As a side thing, the ribbons were transformer coupled at the time. In doing some testing, I noticed that the copper losses and inductance losses in the transformer were almost the same as if we were to direct drive the ribbons with only a resistor to bring up the impedance of the midrange from 0.1 ohm to 1 ohm. We paralleled the two ribbon woofer windings, and with a few changes in the tweeter, we were able to make the whole thing One Ohm.

Two big surprises, as we expected the sound to be the same with one ohm and four ohm. It was much better with one ohm. The second surprise was that most amplifiers would not expire into one ohm, only the Krell at the time had the adequate current reserve to really sing. This caused a riff with most of our dealers who were ML at the time.

As a result, I then took a 34 year hiatus from audio. My attorney at the time said that he thought I was a victim of an attempted squeeze out. I took a stock position with the company, and when they went public 5 years later, I got paid. Went from the top of the mountain to the pits on my 40th birthday. I never turned on a hi fi in 34 years, and never listened to music except in stock car radios for that time. I went into astronomy as a hobby, and vowed to never spend any money in hi fi as a result. I got the desire to start again about a year ago. The Scintillas were in storage for most of that time.

I now have started again and have a nice system. ND555, Krell, Townshend, Inakustics, Unity Core. It all sounds very nice. What amazes me is that todays system sounds so much better than I remember the Scintillas in the 80’s. Equipment has really got better.

May be this explains why I have the MQA itch. Very close to pulling the trigger on the Mytek Manhattan II with network card. I plan to run the ND555 analog outs into it line level selection, and keep the MQA thru the Mytek.

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HI Bailyhill,

A fascinating story. Perhaps my Primare monoblocks would have driven the Scintillas reasonably well after all.

I satisfied my MQA itch by buying a Mytek Brooklyn+ DAC for my second system (I run a Linn Klimax DS/1 in my main system), and so I am pretty sure that the Manhattan II will be very good indeed. My take after some fairly extensive listening is that Tidal’s MQA Masters do indeed on the whole sound subtly better than their non MQA equivalents, but not to the extent that I couldn’t do without them. The benefit tends to vary from album to album and possibly also from genre to genre with some of the classical albums possibly benefitting most from the MQA processing. However, having recently subscribed to Roon, I can safely say (at least at the level of the Brooklyn+) that I would be perfectly happy to use Roon’s first MQA unfold and do without the full MQA capability in my DAC. It would be interesting to hear how you feel the Manhatten II compares with the DAC in the ND555.

Good luck, and once again great to hear the background of the Scintillas.

Thank you for the history lesson. My Apogee Duetta II speakers were wonderful. I miss them and enjoyed many wonderful evenings filled with awesome music.

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