Yesterday I brought home my NAP 250 and NSC 222, along with a Fraim base and shelf and after fuddling for 2 hours with assembly, I’ve managed to clock in about 4 hours of listening.
My first impression was fantastic. More detail, more clarity, more separation of instruments, more everything. Parts of songs that seemed subdued relative to the feature instrument were noticeably more pronounced. For example, in Max Richter’s Vivaldi’s Seasons Winter 1, the lead violin heavily dwarfs the accompanying strings ensemble in terms of presence and impact on the Nova. With the New Classic, its a much more balanced presentation.
The improvement in detail and clarity was immediately apparent to my ears. On Taylor Swift’s Exile, there’s a smattering of bird noise that was always muddled with the Nova, but incredibly clear on my Dan Clark headphones. While not as clear on a good par of cans (as expected), that small detail is now unmistakably obvious on my speakers. Did you know there was a tambourine on Daft Punk’s Touch? I certainly didn’t.
I listen mostly at low to moderate levels (I live with my GF), a constraint that limited the performance of the Nova. With max volume setting of 80 in the Naim app, I had to bring the volume to at least 45 to before the soundstage and dynamics would appear. I know it isn’t an apples to apples comparison without true level matching, but the system starts coming alive when the NSC 222 is beyond just 20 in my room.
As far as usability goes, which was my main gripe with the ND5 / Supernait combo I demoed at home, it’s exactly the same as the Nova. With the optical remote cable between the NSC 222 and the NAP 250, the two units are working in complete tandem. The experience is exactly the same as the Nova, where you are interfacing with a single device. You turn on the system, choose songs and adjust the volume from the same remote / app. There is no HDMI port, so I’ll have to hunt for an optical toslink cable soon, but I’m currently too engaged with the music to care about TV for now.
Take all of this with a grain of salt and the caveat that there might be a non-negligible amount of recency / confirmation bias sprinkled in my write up. I did just spend $20K USD on this stuff, but to revive the old audiophile adage, even my girlfriend noticed the difference!
Edit: My speakers are the KEF Reference 3, btw.