I understand that Supernait 3 is pretty flexible to work with any speaker cables. Are Transparents still not quite recommended?
Hi and welcome to the Naim forum, nice place & nice people.
Do you mean the US cable brand Transparent ???
I don’t know what the CL&R specs are as they don’t seem to publish them, I guess the basic cables are OK, but those with the noise reduction network lumps, I would go careful.
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Hi Mike-B and thank you, happy to be here!
Yes, I mean the US brand cables which have in-between those lumps as you say, so I’ll avoid testing them.
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Do you have a reason not to use NACA5? It’s made for the job, after all.
If you need something more flexible, you can often find NACA4 on FleaBay, or Linn still sells their LK20, which is the same.
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I agree with @graham55.
Blue Jean Cables are also worth looking at. They provide good guidance about cables. Roger Russell has a website, which also provides guidance. The guidance says look at the electrical properties of cables, that they are fit for purpose, and avoid expensive cables that make unsubstantiated claims!
I tested NACA5, I think the mid and lower range are great but I missed a little more openness in the higher register. That bothered me particularly in classical music as overtones of for example piano and violin were a little subdued and the acoustics of the concert hall did not quite come through in my system at least. I liked the precision of NACA5 and if I’d only listen to other than classical music I think I would have gone for those since rock stuff came through pretty nicely.
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Many thanks for the hint, I’ll have a look in there.
In the past I have tried Transparent speaker cables with a NAP250-2, and Transparent power cables with Naim gear. Neither worked very well at all. My dealer (for both Naim and Transparent Cable) agrees that the two brands don’t work so well together. For Naim gear they recommended Nordost in the past. They don’t like NACA5 because it’s so horrible to try and deal with for customer installations, so they avoid it. I don’t blame them. However, now they mostly just deal with the Naim lifestyle products (Uniti, Mu-so).
Gregorius,
consider Vertere, the brand supposedly making SuperLumina for Naim. I moved there from NAC A5 and have not gone back. To my ears, everything that a speaker cable should have. I too listen mostly to acoustic music, mainly classical and jazz, and am perfectly happy with the Pulse X mini. The current line is perhaps called Redline.
Not cheap, but the idea and its construction are complex and partly justify the cost. And they’re flexible.
Best
M.
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I agree, unless needing long runs of speaker cable NACA5 is the business, and sounds really natural with beautifully natural high end and low end extension without highlighting or lumpiness. Choral works recorded in cathedrals sound sublime with NACA5, one can hear the natural openness of the reverb without artificiality and without over focussing on fricative consonant sounds that I have found several audiophile/hifi speaker cables can do which can be so distracting.
Yes it is slightly stiff. I would avoid having NACA5 run in parallel with other cables like mains leads or Ethernet leads.
I have tried various speaker cable, some at silly prices, but I have always returned to NACA5 with Naim.
It has a wonderful PRAT through a good frequency/phase performance, no doubt through its relatively straightforward impedance model due to its construction. Simplicity is key for natural speaker cables.
I would say if NACA5 doesn’t sound natural in your setup, I would look at why and address that, rather than try and use the speaker cable as a modifier. The passive speaker and amp coupling is uber sensitive for natural relatively uncoloured performance (if that is what you are after)
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NACA5 is multi strand, not solid core.
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Yes silly me, I have checked my last soldered connections and it is indeed multi strand - thanks for correcting my post - I have edited it.
I was likely thinking of some earth connections I was soldering recently with solid core… also very stiff!
Having soldered a few over the years, I can confirm it is multicore.
Just fairly stiff.
Hi @Gregorius and welcome to the forum.
I agree with comments regarding NACA5 and its excellent performance, but it is somewhat stiff. Use of a hairdryer to make it more malleable whilst positioning has been used/recommended on a number of occasions. See other posts on the forum - use search function.
If you are looking for something much more flexible and not that high in cost many folks here have used Kudos KS-1 cable. It is flexible, easy to position and assemble with a variety of plugs (including Naim Amp plugs) depending on your preference.
As ever at the end of the day a trial/demo with your own kit is recommended.
Good to read interesting comments by you all. An update from my part, in the meantime I changed the signal cables to something more bright and then wanted to test NACA5 again. The situation is better, the upper register is almost right and pretty acceptable by now, still a tiny bit dark. I might stick to these for now and take my time testing others. I’m wondering, Naim recommends that the cables should be at least 3,5 meters. My test cables re 4 meters. Is the length even with Supernait 3 that crucial? I am temped to think about what would happen if there were a half of it. The sound is big now, but I would agree to give away a little of the largeness if in return I could have a little more clarity and transparency in the sound stage.
Only for the older designed Naim amps. There is no minimal distance with the newer designs, but they still recommend lengths between 2 and 20 metres for best performance… as stated in the respective product manuals.
For the older designs the length was crucial to avoid the risk of amp destruction or overheating. The manual of the respective amp will or should make clear if this crucial or not.
The SN3 manual is, to my mind, thoroughly confusing on speaker cable requirements.
First this:
Then this:
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Hell, I don’t even know what hard and fast rule there is for my 300 DR. I always thought it was the NACA5 3.5 m thing, but now I’m not so sure. In any case I am using a NACA5 7m pair terminated with Siltech deltron-style bananas at amp and speaker ends.
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Indeed that looks perhaps not as clear as it could be to me, as it doesn’t state explicitly what cable should be at least 3.5 m, so that suggests that is the minimum length for any speaker cable.
This is the Nait50 manual, which uses one of the new Naim amp designs, where the cable type is more explicitly stated for performance reasons, but the minimum length is not so crucial:
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