The Naim New Classic Range - Part 2

I have a vision of me in like a decade or so, having to get the naim box out of the loft to grab, the until that point unused remote, when I eventually have to let go of the nd5 xs2 :joy:

What Hi-Fi have just put their review of the 222 on the website.

I’m a bit confused by their comment on lack of a USB connection. According to the NAIM website the NSC 222 has two, one on the front and the other on the rear marked for audio input.

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They mention no USB B type input, which is correct as both on the NSC 222 are USB type A.

I am not sure judging from the headakes lack of realworld compatibility among tvs and preamps with hdmi I am not sure this is a fatal ommition.

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Agree having an AV bypass function is a better feature than HDMI connectivity.
At least this reviewer can detect a positive difference the additional power supply brings unlike some :see_no_evil:

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They are complaining about the lack of a USB input that can be used to play audio from a computer. No Naim product has ever included this except for the V1 DAC, so it shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone.
If the range of digital sources available to you from these 2nd gen. Naim streamers isn’t sufficient, fair enough, get a DAC with a USB input, but then why buy a combined streamer/DAC when you could get a standalone DAC for far less money, or a much better one for the price of a combined streamer/DAC.

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Ah, that makes a bit more sense now.

lol
Yeah that one review shocked me as I can tell the difference a PS makes almost immediately. I always say to myself ā€œwhat just happened?ā€ with a nice smile on my face.

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It does not follow that an NPX300 will make a noticable difference to a NSC222. I’m not saying that it
doesn’t, just that other power supplies making a big difference on other Naim boxes does not imply that. Things may be different now.

You are right but do you really believe Naim would have used resources on adding an expensive ps if it did not make a difference in tests? Of course you can say that you want people to spend the same amount for a ps that makes no difference, that would really make some buyers angry and not be a good way to keep customers happy.
And if you accept that ps’s used to make a diffrence why should this suddenly not be the case in a new preamp?
Claus

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Agree with you wholeheartedly Claus :+1:

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It is up to everyone to decide whether they hear a difference a PSU makes.
My comment was specifically about a reviewer of hifi on the internet.
If they are unable to detect any difference it makes me question their ability to do the job they are purportedly doing - that’s all.
Adding a PSU will not make a difference to all.

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The review in question is also focused on the listening and usability aspects. They get very caught up in the product lacking certain features like tone control and EQ as well as HDMI eARC as examples.
They almost certainly just piled the boxes on top of each other and shoved them on their AV sideboard and hooked them up to their ā€œgo toā€ Klipsch speakers.
They don’t talk at all about the range design, the evolution from previous generations, the signature sound characteristics, the setup and system synergy aspects, they probably had demo units that hadn’t been run in properly and the listening environment and speaker/cabling used may not have shown the equipment at its best.
They also seemed keen to point out that it wasn’t value for money and you could get the same performance for less cash.
US brands on home turf will also tend to be cheaper, be more widely available and be what people are more used to seeing and hearing, like Mcintosh, PS Audio, Schiit, Klipsch etc etc, whereas in the UK the bias is the same just towards UK brands like Naim, Linn, PMC, ATC and so forth.
So it also could come from the fact he’s just used to a certain sound from US brands and has a certain expectation of what a modern preamp should be, as I’m sure we’ll appreciate, adding more complexity and in close proximity compromises the performance and Naim have always designed with a separation of power and electronics in an effort to reduce system noise and increase performance. Ideally to form a valid judgement of what a PSU brings to a system you need 2 identical systems setup side by side both with and without that PSU and flip back and forth between them, this sort of setup is rare and you’ll usually have to hope you can home demo and make a valid judgement relative to your own listening environment that can be done over a period of time and using equipment that has already been run in.
I imagine if any of us were dipping in and out of systems for short periods of time and not having a base reference system to refer back to we’d find it hard to provide a true impression of what a system offered relative to others.
One positive aspect was his willingness and desire to mix and match components and test individual boxes mixed in to other systems, again something that is hard to demo in the wild.

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There’s something ā€œstrange ā€œ in the new classic range. Looking at the pictures on Naim website a label on the back of the units reports ā€˜designed in the UK by Naim audio’
The same label on the old units reports ā€˜ designed AND MADE in the UK’
Are the new units made somewhere out of Salisbury? :face_with_monocle:

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You really need to read the Part 1 thread :wink:

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Thank you. I probably missed something.

Naim has a 2nd factory in Slovakia now but they are all trained to sailsbury standards.

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Naim can’t expand capacity at the factory any further, and finding people locally with the right skills is currently very difficult, so they use one of their existing partners in Slovakia (who have done some really excellent SMT PCB work for them) to build some of the units. That way Naim hope to avoid long delays in supplying products that can be so damaging to business.

It is all done to Naim standards and is as close as it can be to having an extra wing of the Salisbury factory, just located 1500 miles away on the continent. Once built the units actually return to Salisbury for final testing. As such, the label has been amended slightly so the same rear panel can be used whether built in UK or in Slovakia.

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Thank you Richard.

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