Call me old fashioned, but I can’t help think that Naim products get slightly uglier with each iteration. The expression of the middle ‘chunk’ that was implemented after the olive series does nothing for the visual proportions, in my opinion anyway.
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Interesting, thanks!
How about the PowerLine, not mentioned in the manuals of the new classics but they are still recommended I guess? I live in the EU and dont get the Lite’s.
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I know what you mean, there is something so elegant about the older gear but in no way could that design be retained in todays market. Bling sells! Not that the new shell is particularly bling, it just had to exhibit a modern form factor.
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Sadly the NSC222 does not contain a native DSD DAC, but a PCM one, perhaps Naim should have produced a model that supported both DAC’s rather than using code to convert DSD to PCM, which really removes a lot of the advantages of DSD with it’s single bit high sampling rate.
yes, they are
Hope they sound great because at $9000 each in the US they have some stiff competition.
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Khan - agreed. That picture alone says a thousand words. It’s a design classic. Someone knew what they were doing back then to be sure.
If you look at the front of the classic series and the front of the olive series as elevations of a building, there is one that would not get any design awards.
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Did you not say you sold the 252 setup off several years back? I get that your excited with you’re new purchase but comparing it to something you haven’t owned in years is misleading at best. It may very well be that the two are on par, but a proper comparison would need to be done to prove so.
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I agree entirely. I think that the aesthetics of the Olive kit was Naim’s best ever. I don’t understand the need for the various geometric shapes that we’ve seen since.
I’ve said it often enough in the past, so I tend not to bother these days. (No one likes listening to a broken record.)
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I think it will take some weeks to be able to comment on the definitive sq. It’s a little up and down (with the odd glimpse of what’s to come) at the moment, as you might expect during burn-in. However, having ridden the Naim early stage roller coaster many times I have a gut feel that I am witnessing the birth of something special.
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Is that the one with the Austin metro type buttons?
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Well if an integrated Streamer DAC pre can compete with an integrated streamer-DAC and dedicated pre with external PS it’s definitely special.
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Hi @djh1697,
This is a good question and one that got a lot of attention in R&D.
DSD and it’s purity is a big topic. Certainly not for my lunch break.
DSD can only be pure if the recording was mixed down in the analogue domain and converted to DSD once (i.e. like analogue archiving). If it were a digital recording then it would need to be recorded in one take with no mixing or level changes.
Most DACs that say native DSD may not be as they seem. If they are multi-level Delta Sigma (DS) then they are not 100% native DSD. Only if they are pure 1 bit DS with no internal oversampling.
The SHARC DSP in our streamers integer down-samples DSD to 705.6kHz using 40 bit floating point math. It is not down sampled to 44.1kHz 16bit. The Nyquist sampling theorem covers this.
Designers must make many decisions when ‘spending’ the customers money irrespective of the product or service. IMHO adding a set of I2S switches, DAC, filters would not be good VFM.
I hope listeners enjoy our high resolution algorithm.
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Yes. The metro also being a design classic.
And yet, back in the day, Naim were getting so much flak from people about how the Olive kit was looking a bit dated and somewhat “agricultural” what with the funny plastic buttons and the fact you could see daylight through the fascia gaps. For many, the move to the Classic look was a revelation by comparison and was universally praised by critics.
Its a funny old world…
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or in this case the purchaser. My 82 is an (pre) amplification design classic. Beautiful it is not.
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Including a cleaning cloth… nice touch! 
I would like to see a comparison with the cleaning cloth from apple. 
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I imagine that’s to cover themselves when inevitably someone cleans the plastic parts of the casing and it gets covered in scratches. (Ohh, you mean you didn’t use the little cloth we supplied in the box?)
At least it’s just a strip in the middle and not the whole case, probably something a dealer can replace.
If the RCU is anything to go on it won’t be long before we see a “My 200 Series is covered in scratches” thread 
The 300 Series will use a sapphire crystal insert instead, so that’s a bonus.