Odd NAC552 volume control glitch

Hi-Fi Corner
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A weird thing happened tonight while I was listening to my system, in the middle of one track, which was playing pretty loud at about 9 o’clock setting on the 552 volume control, I wanted to lower the volume gradually using the Narcom remote only to find the NAC with lights off (music still playing fine though) and pressing the volume buttons on the remote did not bring the lights up on the NAC…

About 10-15 seconds later, the lights came back on, but with the NAC volume control dial turned to 3 O’clock! and the music still at the same volume… I moved the volume control all the way from 0 to the full range and it barely made a dent on playback volume.

I stopped everything, shut down the entire stack and rebooted. It works fine now but I am baffled with what could have caused this.

I do have a Chord Dave as a digital source, and it is set to Digital Preamp mode, I took a look at its volume to ensure it didn’t change causing the NAC to have a much larger range of volume control motion, but nope the DAC was as it always was.

All works fine now but would love to hear if anyone else faced anything similar and if there is any hint as to what went wrong.

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I have the lights off on my 552 but, as you know, the lights should come on when adjusting the volume with a remote.

Very occasionally, when I use the remote to adjust the volume, the lights do not come on but the volume does change as intended.

I have never had the problem of turning the 552’s volume knob and the volume not changing.

Hopefully a glitch you have sorted by rebooting.

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I echo NigelB’s experience in that very occasionally my 552 will also not light back up when altering the volume, but the sound and dial operate as expected all the same. Usually, the lights suddenly remember that they were supposed to be on and return for a second or so before fading as usual.

I would have thought the dial and connected rod run hard-wired to the track and so it really is very strange how the volume would not change over the dials full scope of travel; I could understand this far better with a ‘fly by wire’ digital volume control glitch…

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I wonder whether there was some sort of voltage spike that caused this. The NAC552 logic board could be quite sensitive to static and could lock up. A power cycle would clear it.

1 Like
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The good news is that so far everything works well. During the many years I’ve been in the Naim world this never happened to me with any of the preamps, so wanted to see if others came across this or if there where clues as to what may have caused it…

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