Unless you are in the market for 52. £3-4k recently. Not bad if you ignore inflation.
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Yes indeed olive and CB gear holds up well.
Yep, that was in the early 90s
I recall a Nait 2 was around €550-600 locally currency.
Sold direct to customers by distributor which had stores, no middleman.
The paradise lasted shortly as other claims came in from neighbor countries.
Worth notice the UKP had a much higher value at that time - € wasn’t implemented.
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Probably! Hi Fi firms like everyone else i.e. energy suppliers need to wake up and smell the coffee we have a major recession coming…soon
Yes I think it’s more that Naim have expanded their range upwards with the Statement stuff. (And down with the Muso etc)
When I started buying stuff the range went from Nait 3 (about £450) to 52 (about £4,500). It now goes from £800 to £200,000.
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At the risk of injecting some factual data into a discussion which seems to be dangerously close to just repeating truisms about the nature of cost and value that you can find in a GCSE Economics textbook…
Using the old price lists compiled by @sihctr and the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, I’ve taken the back-then price of a NAP250 at five-year-ish increments and inflation adjusted it to 2021 (rounded to 2sf). Are you ready?
- In 1982, £675 - the equivalent of £1900 in 2021
- In 1987, £956 - the equivalent of £2200 in 2021
- In 1992, £1398 - the equivalent of £2500 in 2021
- In 1996, £1577 - the equivalent of £2600 in 2021
- In 2001, £1855 - the equivalent of £2800 in 2021
- In 2005, £2400 - the equivalent of £3400 in 2021
- In 2011, £3050 - the equivalent of £3600 in 2021
- In 2018, £3899 - the equivalent of £4100 in 2021
So, the cost of at least one of Naim’s products has risen steadily in real terms over a 30-year period. Any price rises now, therefore, cannot be claimed to be a new departure in this sense - it’s been going on for decades.
Remember, of course, that this is only vaguely comparing like with like - a 1982 vintage 250 is definitely not the same thing as a 2022 250(DR), despite the model numbers not changing!
Mark
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I imagine (having no facts whatsoever to back it up) that the market for a 250 (being relatively affordable and useable with different pieces of Naim kit) is bigger than that for a 52 and Naim would take advantage of this (legitimately) to boost revenue over the years. In the same way that rail firms increase the cost of tickets at times of peak demand). I would also imagine that the same would be similar for a Supercap which again has a wider appeal. Facts really get in the way of good old conjecture. 
Well, don’t let me stop you doing an equivalent set of calculations for a more niche piece of Naim kit.
Mark
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I’d rather just sit on the naughty step. Much less effort 
Has anyone found an actual copy of this Sept22 Naim price list…?
Yep, instructions here:
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Eye Thang Yew… 
Well done, Signals HiFi.
And - its good to see that a few Naim prices have actually dropped, although not by much…
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My impression is that good audio has become relatively cheaper over the years.
Here in Sunny Perth a NAP 250 CB was $3000 in 1984. Average male FT earnings were just shy of $18K, so 17%. These days, with the upcoming price rise I think the NAP 250DR will just top $10,000, (it’s $9400 ATM). Average male FT earning here in WA are just shy of $100K. So 10%.
I did the sums for my old tri-amp system, but a bit rubbery as I can’t get exact average male FT earnings, and the Linn Naim list price in 1977 is a bit hazy, but basically at around $17,000 for the full set up including a LP12/Grace 707/Supex, it was about 1.5 x average male FT. A full Solstice/500 system with a decent pair of speakers would be around $200K, so 2 x average male FT. But this is not comparing apples with apples.
I suspect a 100K NDX2/252/300 system with reasonable speakers would blow a late 70’s tri-amp system away. I have heard a pretty decent early 80’s active Isobarik system, with a modern front end, a few years back against my lowly S400s, and honestly, the sentimental favourite Briks were so closed in, boxy and loose compared with the S400s I at first though they were faulty, (they weren’t). And I well remember how open, fast and controlled the active Briks were back in the day compared to anything going except electrostatics.
So basically my point is as far as performance goes, you get a lot more bang for your buck today. Not just with Naim, but with most high end product. I of course don’t include the bogus “high end” products that we on the forum never seem to chat about. But that’s always been poor value.
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As I’m a child of the eighties my interest is in the Naim amp range from the Nait to the 252/300 only. That range is good still good vfm imo (If you like Naim). If you take into account the advances in audio tech then I agree that bang for buck is better now although not enough for me to shell out for (Other than a 5si which I own in a 2nd system). The rest of their range is just fluff to me.
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…and their focus is now elsewhere, understandably so. They have developed quite a diverse product range since parting ways with Naim.
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…they’re the equivalent of £6,945 here in NZ. I was looking at a pair of Dynaudio Confidence 30’s (distributed by the same company as Naim last weekend, but they’re £25,718 here, which is rather a premium for shipping internationally…
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They’ve gone up pretty much 5% each April since time eternal and until now, inflation was never 5%.
As for international prices, every bit of hifi that is not domestic to your country is priced in a bracket that makes it uncompetitive in any country that has a mature hifi manufacturing industry. This is why British hifi gets such great reviews in the UK. It isn’t biased. It’s that all the GBP 1500 amps from overseas are priced at GBP 3000 and up against a totally different class of gear.
The only above board way I know of to get Naim gear from the UK without ruffling any feathers is to live in a country with zero Naim distributor at all. But you still need to form a relationship with a UK dealer. It’s a major hassle for them to support problems thousands of miles away. Mine is semi retired and when he finally decides to pack up, I’m not sure I’ll have a good way of buying stuff from the UK. OTOH, the last price increase already killed my ability to do the next Naim jump to 500 series. So maybe it doesn’t matter.
I’ve greatly enjoyed my Naim systems and will continue to do so. But like many, my salary has stayed pretty flat, the cost of living has gone bananas, and I have a mortgage and kids to feed. So I see my only realistic options as stop buying new hifi (what I have is certainly past what I thought was end-game a decade ago) or buy domestic Japanese brands - of which I’m actually very fond of anyway.
The point to this ramble is that the price increase, minor or not at all in some cases, doesn’t exist in isolation. There is a broader global situation that is evolving and making things more difficult for most people. The result is likely to be consumers retrenching back to domestic brands and the forces driving that probably far outweigh anything Naim could counteract with flat or even lower prices at this stage.
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I agree I’m priced out of naim upgrades but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my 2 naim systems immensely. I do enjoy them every day and question the need to go any further in the naim upgrade path
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Few items are less expensive now than they were in the past. Electronics are the primary exception. Any electronic device should cost less in real terms today than they did in the past, not twice as much (after correcting for inflation).
Sigh… I guess that’s the world we live in!
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Greed is good, apparently.
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