1 It is considered by a lot of people that many (but by no means all) preamps from other manufacturer’s do not generally give as well balanced a result as using a Naim pre with a Naim power amp.
2 It is considered by a lot of people that many (but by no means all) passive ‘preamps’ do not give a particularly balanced response with Naim power amps, but there are some specific combinations that, by some people are thought to work well.
3 Many power amps from other manufacturers are believed to work well with a greater range of other manufacturer’s preamps, including passive ‘preamps’. (As IB also literally just pointed out while I was typing this!)
4 Most Naim preamp and power amp combinations give a distinctly synergistic effect (a notable exception being a NAC202 paired with a NAP250, for many people, this combination doesn’t sound right).
There’s more than one way to skin a feline. There are many manufacturers of power amplifiers who don’t take the somewhat dogmatic view that their preamps, should they make them, are a requirement. Your question can’t really be answered by me, since you imply a Naim power amp must have a Naim preamp…which is something I don’t subscribe to.
I’d tell that 3/4 of your NDX2 is a dac and an analogue output. If you use your Huge, these 3/4 are useless for you. I’m pretty sure, that for the half of the price of NDX2 you can find some excellent digital-only transport with perfect software.
£££££! (Or $$$$$, €€€€€, ¥¥¥¥¥…!) If you don’t need a pre, you can spend your budget on a better power amp (or something else). And with some poweramps, perhaps not Naim, you might get better sound quality not having the extra electronics in the path.
It seems a pity because at least one aspect of Naim’s approach to power amp design is particularly interesting, namely using only a single pair of output transistors instead of the more usual paralleled devices, but having to also pay for a preamp when not otherwise needed makes the amp considerably more expensive.
Julian was adamant that for best performance the Pre-amp and power should be well matched - something that could be guaranteed with both items from Naim but nigh on impossible when you tried to use a Naim power amp with a non-Naim pre-amp. He wrote “The pre-amp bandwidth and rise time define the operating envelope of the power amp… …We go to very great lengths to match the two parts of the system, unfortunately most of the other pre-amps (particularly those of US design) have wide or very wide bandwidths (DC to Light…) these are TOTALY unsuitable for use with our power amps”
That’s a VERY interesting quote, because one of the modifications I made to the power amp design was to apply a first order passive filter at the input and then internal phase compensation that was used to limit the forward bandwidth to prevent transient latch-up conditions occurring in the driver transistors!
It also had a lot of additional decoupling capacitors on the power supply rails, and a lot of attention to reducing the impedance paths from the power supply to all the internal stages, but principally to the gain group and drivers (the output stage was inherently presented with a low impedance power supply), and correspondingly similar attention was paid to the impedance of all the 0V points.
(Whilst also still keeping an eye on the Nyquist plot to ensure overall stability!)
I’ve compared RCA out of my ND555 with A/V DIN OUT to RCA out of my NAC 552. Both into a Violectric V281 headphone amp. I could not hear a difference.
The cable from the ND555 was a Chord Sarum T. The cables from the ND555 to the A/V out of the NAC 552 were an Ansuz D2 DIN/DIN and a Teddy P. DIN to RCA.
A bit weird idea - spend £££££ on NDX2 and use about 1/4 of this streamer. To me, some digital-only streamer + preowned preamp instead of NDX2 are much better investment.
I have run my 500dr direct from my rossini when my 552 went off to be serviced, I made up 2 cables to do this and used this set up for about 5 weeks.
To start with it worked fine, but it didn’t have the same sound as with the pre amp, it lost some dynamic performance and didn’t sparkle quite the same.
Now if I didn’t have the pre or had heard what they do together, then I could have easily lived with the sound in blissful unknown harmony, but I did know and couldn’t wait to get it back.
My advice would be, if you don’t want to run a pre amp, go and buy something other than a naim power amp, lots of great amps that will work on their own to choose from
I would add that the modern Naim amps are far less idiosyncratic. As much as a enjoyed & enjoy CB, I never really got on with Olive, I REALLY enjoy the more modern Naim sound. For me it incorporates the ‘round earth’ elements I enjoy, and works more easily with a range of other equipment.
quote=“Pauel, post:35, topic:19020”]
A bit weird idea - spend £££££ on NDX2 and use about 1/4 of this streamer.
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Not my idea! However, you’ll find a few people who do use the NDX2 as a renderer/transport, saying they find it better than others they’ve tried and citing Naim’s attention to various critical detail as the reason - but using with a different DAC they find better than that in the NDX2. Google NDX2 in posts by @Simon-in-Suffolk
To me, better is a good renderer and Chord DAC (or other with similar naturalness) with exemplary RF input isolation inbuilt or in between, the DAC incorporating a volume controlled buffered output stage with UHF filtering, capable of driving a power amp directly without detriment to DAC or PA.
There was a guy on hifi Wigwam who had a beautiful Wadia CDP with volume control straight to a power amp. Was very good but one day for an experiment he tried a valve pre and the performance was transformed.