Tír Na HiFi

I'm going to hear what all of this fuss is about.
I'm not sure yet which day though.
Last time that I listened to Naim kit in earnest was about 25 years ago.
Couldn't afford it then.
Went down the usual Nad and mission route.
Many changes later I wonder if I'd stretched the €s then I might have saved a fortune over the years ?

I hope to make it along as Naim were always talked of in hallowed tones when I cut my hifi teeth, but I never got to hear them. I'm guessing I'll be there on Sunday.

I'm hoping to make it along to this too, perhaps on Sunday. Never heard a Naim system but from reading other forums, Naim do seem to divide opinion.

I spoke to Noel about the show 2 months ago and from what he said was that the newer Naim stuff is a bit more relaxed and refined than the older models. Some of the Naim diehards werent too happy with this change. Any of the Naim owners here care to comment?

I have to say though that I dont like their modular upgrade path especially with respect to power supplies. Why cant they just integrate a proper power supply into the unit in the first place!? Obviously it make them more money.

Anyone go to this today? Think I'll head there tomorrow around noonish I'd say.

Any positive vibes from event ????

I had to skip it in the end as something else came up. I take that nobody from here was at it.

I also missed it, as we never even made it out of the house yesterday.

There was a fair few people there on Sunday morning. I'm probably not the best person to give an unbiased account as all my "real" hifi is Naim and I'm a convert.

Doug, a Scot (an accent I find much easy to listen to) from Naim went through a one and a half hour demonstration.

First off he did some explaining about streaming and the Naim app that controls the streaming through the iPad (and iPhone but he never mentioned this). Obviously his remit was to sell streaming and then sell Naim's streaming solution.

So we started off with Naim's entry level streamer ND5XS, then added a power supply (XPND or some such) to this. (the idea of the external power supply is to make a "quiet box" by removing the big toroidal transformer with its hum and vibration.)
Then on to the NDX and then an added power supply (XPS). At all these stages there was a clear improvement in separation and decrease (disappearance) of harshness, more musicality. Yeah I know, very hard to describe sound.
Then on to there top of the range streamer. the NDS which needs a power supply as it has none of its own and it was connected to the 555PS ( a mammoth) with separate power chords for the analogue and digital parts of the NDS.
This (as was to be expected) sounded damn good to my ears. At all stages in the process a tack was played on the stand alone streamer then the same track on the streamer with a power supply. Snippets of all the tracks were then replayed through the NDS and it's superiority was affirmed.

Then some time was spent (unnecessarily in my view) trying to show a difference in sound between rips from an apple mac, PC and Naims ripper the unitiserve.

Then towards the end the opening up of music by bands recording on their own and distributing over the internet and how Naim's streamers give you access to this was discussed and demonstrated with a good female vocal track.

lastly as a rowdy crowd were waiting less than patiently to gain access to the next demo, we were briefly played a high res track (from Yes album Fragile?) which did sound good but I don't know the track so couldn't say what high res brought to the party. I thought Doug came over as a nice guy and one interesting thing he said about high res was that a lot of music from the mid 80's to today was (and I'm paraphrasing wildly due to lack of technical knowledge) taped in such a way that remixing (remastering?) at a higher resolution would do nought whereas the recordings from the 50s to early 80s there was enough data there to do a decent high res mastering.

I enjoyed the morning, but don't know exactly how much I would have learned if I didn't know a bit about streaming before hand.


There was another room upstairs showing the Naim all in one Uniti (I think) but I gave that a miss as I couldn't manage any more time on those wooden chairs.


It would be interesting to know what the unconverted made of the day.


SJB

I didn't get to go but sounds like it was very well attended. I think as I said before John that naim sits in a similar camp to cyrus but probably a lot higher up the food chain. Black boxes that don't excite some people but by all accounts there are plenty of interested punters and I can see why. My cyrus amp is small compact,good remote , good upgrade options and delivers a really top notch sound. But among hifi boys valves and more exotic gear will always attract more attention .See the wigwam thread on naim/cyrus and the entrenched views(hate) of this type of gear.
Naim gear seems to be very similar but has stuff available at a much higher price range. I am assuming Naim are a larger more successful company than cyrus.

Thanks for the run down on the day, it sounds very interesting comparing their latest offerings. I've not heard the Naim streamers and servers, I'd be curious how they stack up against the CD players, which share the same power supplies and have a big influence on the house sound. I have a foot in both camps, I love the sound of the Naim CD players (I'm on my second and just selling it to upgrade to another one), I consider them the strongest point of the Naim range (Naimites, please feel free to shoot that one down), and whilst I appreciate they would have been designed for an all Naim system, to my ears they excel with non Naim downstream. I'm sorry now that I couldn't make it up for the weekend.

Great news Cloney, looks like a visit after Christmas is on the cards.