I’ve just been checking out the latest What Hifi? awards results for 2022, and I see that it’s been another very successful year for Naim;
Best wireless speaker over £500 - Mu-So Qb 2nd Gen
Best stereo amplifier £1,500-3,000 - NAIT XS3
Best music streamer over £1,500 - ND5 XS2
Best hi-fi system over £1,500 - Uniti Atom
Notably, for yet another year they are all repeat winners - the Atom for the sixth year in a row!
Well done everybody at Naim!
Well done to naim, just a shame its all the lower end of the market gear these days
Why?
And of course lower end is certainly in the wallet of the beholder.
Hard to believe the atom has been around 6 years now! A clear sign of my ageing as it’s new Naim to me! A wonderful compliment to the original engineering that it could won over six years.
I’ve spent another great evening listening through my 552/300 system into SL2/n-sub. Nice to see that Naim is doing well with what used to be referred to here as comics.
.sjb
Not if you are a very satisfied owner of the “lower gear” it’s not.
I think that the main factor in the What Hifi? awards is performance level for the money (i.e. value for money). To do better I guess takes a lot more money for only relatively small gains in performance, so you rarely see anything there beyond four figures.
I call the magazine What Caravan as they seem to review almost everything except the hi-fi I have got. Well done Naim for creating products in this lower end of the market. Of course for this magazine this is the top end of the market!
Why?
Because its a shame we haven’t seen anything new from naim apart from the turntable for years in the range. But hopefully that will soon change and we might see some new products higher up the range realised.
As said its good to see awards being won
The Muso series 2 and the Nait xs3 and supernait 3 still feel new to me. We’ll probably need the supply line problems to clear before anything else is launched. Remember all the complaining from those waiting for ordered and paid for Solstices?
I think What HiFi rarely go into the really high end, so a product like the Solstice would be unlikely to feature
I assume their best xxx over £yyy includes some assessment of value for money, and given the law of diminishing returns with seemingly near-exponential increase in cost for what in reality are relatively small increases in sound quality, it is unsurprising that the upper ranges struggle to get in there. I also guess that though not stated and maybe not clearly defined, they will have a practical cost ceiling above which they don’t look for these awards.
Edit: reading beyond the first couple of posts I see Richard said something to the same effect.
Personally, I refer more to the articles in HIFI CRITIC and not to a site funded by advertisements…
I believe that Hifi Critic is not funded through advertising sales but through subscription alone. They claim that they are “the only independent, advert-free, audio review magazine”.
However, we digress somewhat from the thread.
Pretty impressive in this fast changing world that the Atom is still their pick after 6 years. It is good mind you.
Bruce
sound wise im very happy with my atom. Its in the 2 and half years ive owned it im wary of every software update naim release as its mostly caused issues. Soundwise though i wouldnt argue that the Atom deserves its awards.
Shame the Nova doesn’t get a mention, what other competitor would outperform it I wonder at that price point?
Agree. Perhaps what this forum regards as “low end” is very high quality for most folks
Well, this forum once debated what was the best three-box Naim system, with very much the implication that this was a discussion of a basic, bare bones system. The conclusion was that it was, erm, pretty much the system I had at the time, which I had scrimped and saved for, building it up second-hand over several years, only to have it effectively cited on this forum as ‘budget boxes’!
So, I would have to agree!
Mark
A bloody expensive subscription but it’s a very high quality mag and it’s nice not having to wade through a load of ads…
Hasn’t mags like What HIFI lost its importance these days? I never react to what they write. I don’t feel the spirit (or honesty).
