The Naim New Classic Range - Part 2

[ElMarko]

[frenchrooster]

Nine days before expected the 500 series will be relegated to movies duties.

[steviebee]

Naughty FR!

LOL

[frenchrooster]

When the new classic 500 series will appear, the Statements will be probably converted to fridges.

[Gazza]

Wine coolers going down to minus 20 C.

[Mike_S]

Everything but the new stuff is now broken, reduced to dust in the oblivion of useless old gear

[Gazza]

You are a poet, Mike😂

[frenchrooster]

Good idea . Specially today, 34 C here.

[IainO]

To be fair our dealer has advised couple of weeks back selling a kidney for the new 350s!

But it involves a speaker upgrade, total cost currently prohibitive (Serafino G2).

[Tesilk]

Keep it, keep it )

[Bevo]

Yeah I’m feeling really depressed

All my naim gear is sounding really crap now vs the new gear evidently

What shall I do Mike

[Gazza]

Down under fire sale………buy more old gear.

[Mike_S]

@Bevo

What shall I do Mike

Grab a beer, a girl, or a sale bargain. Or, all three

[graham55]

I have never understood what difference regulated or inregulated makes, Richard. Is there a noticeable difference in sound quality?

[Richard.Dane]

Regulated power amps are something of a Naim speciality. This thread might help;

Regulated / Unregulated Amps

I figured I’d easily find an old Internet thread with a list of unregulated amps but no luck. I started to build my own but soon discovered products like the Supernait are unregulated so perhaps the list of regulated amps is actually the shorter one? Can anyone help compile the shorter list. Tx

Note my post trying to explain the difference;

As I’m no electronics engineer and prefer things explained to me in layman’s terms, this is how it was once explained to me; A regulated amp is in essence effectively two amplifiers in one - one that regulates the other. It means that the amp is held to operate within very tightly controlled parameters and performance won’t be allowed to “sag” or “slide” like an unregulated amp when great demands are made of it. They’re not easy to do and quite tricky to get just right, which is why you don’t see them very often except from Naim and maybe one or two others in the past, like Exposure of old.

[Bevo]

Ha indeed

[graham55]

Thanks, Richard, that helps. But I don’t think that I’ll be knocking on a door at Salisbury any time soon, looking for a job!

[Musicraft]

@elevensheep

would love to get your thoughts on how they sound

Sure

[davidhendon]

Actually Quad had a different but maybe in some ways similar approach with current dumping. This was first seen in the 405 and was deployed in Quad’s top power amplifiers ever since. The approach there was to have a powerful but not particularly accurate amplifier to “dump” the power needed and then a small highly accurate class A amplifier in a feedback loop to get the output to be an exact, very low distortion, copy of the input, but larger. Peter Walker’s original article from Wireless World in the early 70s explained it all better than I can.

I use the most recent variant, the Quad Artera Stereo, which in my opinion is a strong competitor to the 250 DR (I have both here) and it costs only about £1500 new. In fact I choose to do most of my listening here with a Nova and the Quad power amp driving my SL2s and keep the 272/250DR mostly for TV watching.

[Xanthe]

My experience working with / building current dumpers is that they have a characteristic type of transient distortion that some people don’t hear, and which some other people find near intolerable!