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Should I add a phono preamp to my NAIM 72/140/Hicap?

seatown7

seatown7

Member
Greetings. I’ve got an opportunity to add a very nice Sutherland 2020 phono preamp to my NAIM 72/140/Hicap based system. I’m running a VPI Scout turntable with a Benz Micro Ace MM cartridge with RCA to DIN and the appropriate Naim MM card for my cartridge.

Anyone have any experience with using a standalone phono pre instead of the onboard NAIM cards? If so, how did you connect it to your NAC 72?
Thank you in advance!
 
I suspect lots of people have. From memory, I bought one of the early Dynavector P75s for mine, and it was a definite improvement - running MCs at least. You connect it with an RCA to DIN cable, into one of the line inputs on the 72.

Is the Sutherland one of the battery powered ones?
 
Thank you for your reply. The 2020 is not battery powered, but allegedly is as quiet due to exhaustive filtering of the supplied power.
 
Depending on the vintage of your 72 I think you have one or two pairs of BNC inputs for phono. Originally there were two pairs, I think later production had one pair. I have two pairs, the first is marked "Phono" on the input selector, the second is marked "Aux" . So when I wanted to compare an external phono stage to the internal cards I left the internal phono cards on the "Phono" input and had straight through cards on the "Aux" input. I connected the external phone stage using RCA to BNC cables. I then swapped the BNCs from my record deck between the 72 "Phono" input and the external phono stage while switching between "Phono" and "Aux", you want the mute on for this!

You are looking at the 2020 but I would also consider better internal phono cards as a way to avoid adding more physical boxes while getting an opportunity to improve over the Naim internal cards.

For what it is worth I decided the latest RSL MC cards were better than the Naim originals by quite a margin, and in my opinion better than a Prefix. I was looking at MC cards and YMMV.
 
I have a later 72 with the single set of inputs. I use a Dynavector P75/20xl in preference to both the original naim mc boards and replacement Neil Jadman mc ones. I noted that the original boards did good things that the p75 doesn't when I swapped them back in. If the stage you are proposing is just the latest stage of an upgrade process then maybe do it. Otherwise the original boards are no slouch.
 
seatown7 said:
Greetings. I’ve got an opportunity to add a very nice Sutherland 2020 phono preamp to my NAIM 72/140/Hicap based system. I’m running a VPI Scout turntable with a Benz Micro Ace MM cartridge with RCA to DIN and the appropriate Naim MM card for my cartridge.

Anyone have any experience with using a standalone phono pre instead of the onboard NAIM cards? If so, how did you connect it to your NAC 72?
Thank you in advance!
Click to expand...

As your Nac 72 may have BNC plugs on phono input, you will need a RCA/BNC interconnect cable between the Sutherland and Nac 72.
Before this you need to pull the internal cards and maybe cut a wire on pcb for each channel.
Don't use RCA/BNC adapters.

Alternative you can use another line input such as tuner, then you need a ordinary RCA/DIN5 interconnect cable.
Still pull the internal cards.
 
Yes do it.

I found that the CD and tuner sounded better once the phono boards had been removed...

When I bought it, I had my NAC72 professionally modded (by an official Naim dealer in Paris) to replace the BNCs with phono sockets. So when I pulled the Naim phono boards out I just had to add two "straps" (wires with tight push-on clips) to obtain an extra "aux" input.
 
I moved from the internal N cards on my 72 to a Stageline N. Needless to say, there was no difference (it was an intermediate stage moving to the NAIM Classic series of electronics).
 
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