I’ve tried many many different carts on my AROs and one of the nice feature of the arm was very rarely a cartridge sounded dire. Including SPU Royal N, Dyna XV1s and Lyra Olympos. Those are pretty heavy cartridges and ARO1 did not have any problem with them. Where I had a problem was with ultra light cartridge ( like 47Labs McBee or a cartridge that tracks at a vert light VTF. ( Technics, Shure et all )
The Dynavector XX2 is said to have the same distance between the tip of the stylus and mounting hole ( 8.5mm) as the Troika which the ARO1 was developed for but many other carts sounded just fine, too!
This is a quantitative rather than a qualitative judgement.
But
I will freely admit that I have no investment here…on the other hand, though, maybe this could make my ideas more objective.
If you put all of the niggles together:
Bias magnet
Cartridge problems (spacers, counterweight)
Some problem with connector pins
…it looks pretty poor to me.
I can see how this would all happen though…I bet, if it had been a project by just one of the two companies, no problem!
With its new product range Naim appears to be on a fantastic roll. The New Classic range is beautiful…i haven’t heard it yet but if it sounds like it looks they will have a fantastic winner.
The Solstice is an outlier. And as i have noted it is so close to the stratosphere you can slmost taste it. That’s why this situation is so crazy. If it was bad nobody would care…just buy another table…between Rega, Vertere, Linn and others there are great options. But even in that company the Solstice is within reach of being the best.
And that’s a shame, because the ARO, in its original form, is a fantastic tonearm.
I still can’t work out - from looking at the few photos that I have seen of it - how and why the ARO2 has put on so much extra weight that it can’t be fitted to an LP12.
I’m the opposite Nigel, I think the Solstice looks superb, whereas whilst I’m sure the 50 sounds brilliant frankly the whole retro thing I find pointless.
Yes, agreed Kuma. Despite the original ARO’s alignment issues with most cartridges outside of the Troika, and a few of the DVs, it’s never really been an issue for me, most would perform really well. One or two carts that were way out happened to sound really great in the arm anyway (The FR MK3 being one such) although long bodied carts could really be a pain to connect with the headshell wires…
In which case, Naim should go back to the drawing board, and re-launch the original ARO.
(I bought a ‘new’ ARO, with new internal wiring by Linn (not Naim), a few weeks ago, so I’m very happy indeed. It has the serial number 1294xx, so I will check soon when it originally left the Salisbury Factory.)
I did try the Solstice……the lovely Jason Gould let me play with the Naim demo unit to my hearts content……not looking over my shoulder. For those that enjoy, i guess what we call the older Naim sound, the Solstice delivered in spades……Roy achieved what he wanted.
I try never to waste my dealers time……but as good as it was, i am too hooked on music servers and skipping tracks, no surface noise……so not for me.
It’s a great turntable, no need to denigrate it……but it would be nice if Naim could guide their dealers and customers to enhance if they wish to. I am a pessimist….hope i am proved wrong.
I think we all have to remember that even on here we are a minority of theNaim community, and right now there will be 350/400 Solstice users worldwide very happily listening to their music and not fretting about any of this stuff that folks here are so steamed up about.
The irony is there is not a single solstice user on this forum expressing any dissatisfaction either. It is mainly wind up merchants or linn fanboys creating all the noise
