I’ve owned my Nat 101 / SNAPS since new bought from Studio 99 Swiss Cottage. It went back to the factory in ‘98 due to the tuner drifting it was there for 8 weeks came back with a new PCB board for the princely sum of £106, those were the days ?
The SNAPS was giving less than the 24.5 volts required in January last year sent it to Darren of Class A for a service came back as good as new and the tuner is back to its best.
It’s such a lovely unit the only downside is that the Naim logo has gone gold due to sunlight.
There is still areas of the UK where internet connectivity is problematic. I have very patchy internet with dropouts and latency and this is down to capacity constraints and old cabling. We only have super fast in the village, so are limited to a max of 80 Mb. If you can’t get super fast then it’s less than 10Mb.
There are plenty of reasons why FM still makes a lot of sense. Putting aside the issue of sound quality, probably the main one is that a great deal of radio listening takes place in the car. If you drive a lot around the country and you have a DAB receiver alongside your FM one, I’d wager that you gave up using DAB a while ago. DAB is fine when you have perfect, or near to perfect reception. However, once this drops below a certain point you start to get “porridge” and then you get nothing. Under similar circumstances with FM, you may get some additional hiss or in the worst cases some crackles or interference but even when there’s almost no signal the best FM receivers can still make it reasonably intelligible whereas with DAB you would have had nothing.
In the interim, I plugged my restored Yamaha T-2 back in. It is very interesting just how different they sound. The NAT03 is much fuller and rich - the T-2 does have a nice refined sound however. I had been planning on selling the T-2 but I don’t think I can bring myself to part with it, in part because it is just so cool looking.
When I built my first mono ‘audio system’, I used FM as my main source, I couldn’t afford records and had loved the radio since my uncle bought me a ‘transistor’ when I was 6/ 7 years old.
I modified my tuner for stereo, I saw the ‘stereo light’ come on as the BBC started stereo broadcasts and at that time it was my best source, given that my cassette tape recorder wasn’t up to much.
As I delved into the world of stereo HiFi my love of FM remained despite being surpassed quality-wise by vinyl.
I love the look of the early NAT complete with mechanical tuning scale, it retains the simplicity of my early forays into FM listening, whilst visually adding a touch of class. Sadly, I am not quite sure how much use it would get these days. Most of our radio listening is via DAB and the internet, even in the car I find that DAB holds its ‘Radio 4’ signal better than FM in our area. I also remember having to retune as I travelled up the country and then finally having to switch over to AM as I drifted further away from civilisation! Fond memories linked to my early days of work when I travelled much more than I do now.
Perhaps I should get a NAT, even if I mainly just look at it!
However, I know what you mean about the sound. I had an absolutely mint Yamaha CT-1010. It looked gorgeous but the sound never engaged me in the way something like a NAT03 could.
Please do, I have one as well, in fact I have four radio sources , two streaming via Nova and UnitiQute, one NAT 03 - with my internet a necessity not a luxury and one that has improved with a Sky Q box, via satellite
Those 03s seem significantly overpriced; I’ve seen them for £250 or so. There is also an 02 for £450, complete with frequency display showing 66MHz, which is usually a sign of a fault. It’s been on there for absolutely ages. It’s a small market for these tuners, but they really are wonderful things.
Definitely has its own sound signature, warm, slow, (takes a minute or so for the valves to warm up) with a nice lightweight curtain effect between me and the music