I wanted to share some recent findings from my ongoing journey with the NC 300 series. For a long time, my system has been anchored by the Super Lumina speaker cables. Let me start by saying the Super Lumina is a PHENOMENAL cable. It bought so much more of all the quintessential Naim attributes and a beautiful rhythmic musicality to my room. The SL has been praised to death so I will not expand on its merits here.
So, recently, I felt the itch to see if there was even more performance hiding inside the 350s. Some of you might have seen my preamp to power amp XLR shootout thread a little while back. During that test, I was completely blindsided by a boutique interconnect called the Stage III Ckahron. That absolute revelation of a cable sent me right down yet another rabbit hole - I just had to know what would happen if similar tech was applied to the speaker end of things. So, I managed to get my hands on a pair of the Stage III Medusa speaker cables.
Before getting into the sound, I have to talk about the physical cable itself. The Medusa is an absolute anaconda of a cable. It is incredibly thick, heavy, and physically imposing. Stage III does not mess around with their construction. They use proprietary pure silver and palladium alloy ribbon conductors, which are actually sealed inside specialized vacuum dielectric tubes to completely eliminate signal interference and dielectric absorption. Wrap all of that in heavy layers of shielding and cap it off with their massive, bespoke solid silver terminations, and you have a cable that looks and feels like an absolute military-grade audio component. A 3m run of this cable is probably as heavy as the 350s, if not more.
I deliberately waited to live with these for several weeks before writing this post, just to make sure I was not suffering from new toy syndrome. The honeymoon phase is now over, and yet the magic is still very very much real. Let me just address the financial elephant in the room right away. Yes, they are eye-wateringly expensive. To put it into perspective, the price of this cable is roughly equivalent to two and a half NAP 350s… But to be fair, boutique speaker cables can get incredibly pricey, and this tier does not even approach the top of the range, which can easily double that cost or more across multiple brands, including this one.
Adding the Medusa between the 350s and my speakers has propelled my system into an entirely different class. The soundstage has become absolutely cavernous. I was always quite proud of the disappearing act my speakers played in my room, but with the Medusa in place, the speakers simply do not exist anymore. What is left is a truly holographic soundscape. The biggest triumphs are the textures and the resolution. I am discovering this incredible micro-textural grit in places I thought there was absolutely none. I am hearing subtle backing vocals in songs I have listened to hundreds of times, for the very first time in my life. Not even a with a great pair of headphones have I been able to resolve this level of inner detail.
And it does all of this with zero hint of harshness. The amount of “air” is unbelievable, delivering massive amounts of high-end detail with absolutely no listening fatigue. On the opposite end of the frequency spectrum, the bass sounds like it gained an entire octave of low-end extension, fully stamped with newfound grip and definition.
All in all, if you can afford to make the leap, I consider this a summit-level component in its own right. People might ask if it is the best value for money upgrade. Honestly? Because the results were so jaw-droppingly transformational, for me, it actually was. I absolutely adore the 350s’ sound and do not want different amplification. This cable just gives me so much more of that addictive Naim magic than I could ever extract from the signal before. It has made that much of an incredible difference to my system, and at this point, you will have to pry these cables out of my cold, dead hands.
If anyone else here has ventured into the deep end of boutique cabling with their Naim amps, I’d love to hear what your findings were.
