Yes but they are necessarily anecdotes, as long as we don’t know Naim’s aggregate failure rates over time vs. units sold
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When I purchased my first naim system the experience was fraught with issues. The lights on the NAC 82 didn’t work, the XPS turned up with a gouge out of the metal casing, and my speakers (B&W) turned up with completely different grain finish. The replacement speakers were then faulty, and the dealer swopped the drivers over from the original pair only to wire up the +ve to -ve in error… for years I lived with a system which was playing out of phase! I could never put my finger on why some stuff didn’t sound quite right… you have to laugh I guess.
Statistically, the odds on me having to return every one of the 5 new boxes I bought in 2017 if standards haven’t slipped must be astronomical, given that in the previous 20 years I returned just one.
That’s not how statistics work. The sample size is so small that it’s impossible to conclude that your findings are due to anything other than chance.
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Unlikely things happen, just rarely. I have 7 boxes from 2018-20 and didn’t have to return any, and yet this also does not allow the conclusion that faults never happen. That’s why without real data nothing can be reliably concluded
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I agree, I can’t be considered as anecdotal. If you add also the number of members returning their gear who post here since maybe 2 years, be it default relay, error gaps in the ripping with the Star, screen freezes, one channel not working……it’s significant. Of course we can’t really know if it’s more or less vs the past, as no numbers are published.
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I should have started my reply with “The odds”, and not statistically. I pondered about using that term and should have stuck when I first removed it from the sentence.
I stand by the rest though.
An increase in anecdotal evidence, while not proving anything, is worrying. To me at least. Like @frenchrooster I’ve seen far more post about broken boxes than I can recall in the past. Indeed before I left the forum about 10 years ago for 5 or 6 years, a post about a broken box was a rare thing indeed.
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A lot less boxes being sold then and many, many more high tech streamers, Mu-Sos etc… being sold these days.
Not to mention a lot more traffic on social media.
Indeed and the stats seem to bear that out.
It would be interesting to see how they stack up on a 6 Sigma error rate. That’s what we/I used in manufacturing. 4 Sigma is around industry standard. It’s a Log calculation, so not easy to get your head around but to get to 6 Sigma you need to have less than 3.2 errors per million opportunities. This is particularly comforting when boarding a plane but not so comforting if you need a prescription. There are a lot of pharmacies at less than 2 Sigma, so be careful as that’s a pretty bad error rate!
It would be great if manufacturers displayed this, a bit like the food hygiene ratings in food premises.
I just checked what a 2 Sigma level represents in errors and it’s 309,000 defects/errors (give or take) per million opportunities. That means that pharmacies get around a third of the prescriptions wrong! Not very comforting to know if you take any medication.
It’s rough what’s happened to you, Steve.
But if a company makes 1000s of products, each product including dozens of components, in the middle of global chaos in manufacturing supply chains, it seems probable that one customer will get such a run of bad luck.
One thing is for sure, Naim Service Dept will never give up on you.
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Except the purchase of said products was in 2017, three years before the pandemic.
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Ok, I did not realise that.
The chaos in global supply chains cannot be to blame then.
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The only stroke of luck in this saga is that I’ll have managed to get every box back to base just two months before the warranty on them expires. Two months later and I’m down to the tune of £2k. That’s a sobering thought which started me thinking; do I want to own those boxes when they fail again?
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That’s a silver lining in the story.
In a few years the whole thing will hopefully seem like a distant memory.
Ouch!