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Naim speakers - I have 'my set'

Sorry to jump in but I'm new to Naim (and decent hifi to be honest) but starting to think about speakers for my system and this thread caught my eye - at the moment, I'm running some Vienna Acoustic Bach Floorstanders - I've had them for since early 2000's, picked up second hand for about £400. They're great - they're easy to listen to though wondering whether to change for some Naim speakers, something a little punchier - what are thoughts here?

My current set up is the XS3 and ND5XS2.

Its possible to go Linn Exakt with Bach speakers too :)
 
FWIW, and I know I’ll end up annoying some folk, but for me the SBL is by far the best of the Naim speakers. Set up well it is coherent, musical, open, agile and fun. The drivers are close enough together to properly integrate (helped by the baffle slope), the cabinet very clever and inert, and the bass deep enough to have some real impact and scale in the right room. Much to my surprise they are very good with valve amps too. My least favourite, by far, are the NBLs which to my ears just sound like three distinct drivers that really shouldn’t be together in one speaker, let alone a couple of feet apart. One of very few speakers I’ve heard multiple times in multiple locations and never wanted to stay in the room with for more than a few minutes. The DBL is better than the NBL, but I still much prefer the coherence and openness of the SBL. The IBL is a likeable little speaker for a tiny flat, but these days SBLs are so devalued why bother, there is likely no difference in price? In the right room (i.e. one where hard against the wall is the best option) I’d argue SBLs were a surprisingly good speaker, far better than many non-Naim fans believe, and don’t assume you need to have Naim kit upstream. I’d very happily use a good valve amp!

You may well be right.... will see how the SBLs stack up against the SL2s very soon. Perceived wisdom is the SL2s should be quite a bit better.... I'm not so sure.
 
The SL2 is after my time so I have no opinion there. I really only know the JV-era kit well.
 
FWIW, and I know I’ll end up annoying some folk, but for me the SBL is by far the best of the Naim speakers. Set up well it is coherent, musical, open, agile and fun. The drivers are close enough together to properly integrate (helped by the baffle slope), the cabinet very clever and inert, and the bass deep enough to have some real impact and scale in the right room. Much to my surprise they are very good with valve amps too.!

A friend lent me his aged pair of SBLs when my speakers died, and I found that I loved them, so much so that I bought them and then had a full new set of drivers installed ....then added a pair of Les's SBL XO. They are great.

Initially I used my EAR534, which I had used for the best part of twenty years. However, I found that my Avondaled CB250 was better, the first time it had ever out classed the EAR. In the event I ended up buying a 300DR. So, I am now using more Naim than at any time since the early 1980s.

I have decided that the SBLs will be my last speakers. They work brilliantly in my room.
 
I'm not sure what this is, do you mean adding additional speakers into my system?

Linn Exakt comprises of a couple of things:

- a streamer / pre-amp
- a digital crossover with multiple DACs (this can be had with or without power amplifiers built in)

The digital crossover is called an Exaktbox and it does several things - it is an active crossover (which works in the digital domain), it eliminates phase and time distortion that is normally present in passive crossovers, it corrects for phase distortions within each drive unit, applies room optimisation (to compensate for bass boom in a room) and then converts from digital to analogue. There is one DAC dedicated to each driver in your speakers and you need one power amplifier channel per driver in your speakers (so for Bach you'd need 4 channels of amp). You can use any standard power amplifier.
The Exaktbox needs programming for the type of speaker in use in the system - the good news is that the Vienna Acoustics Bach is one of those speakers. The speakers need some small physical changes too (adding a pair of terminals, removing the passive crossover) but these are pretty straightforward.
What you get is a pair of actively driven speakers that take their performance up several notches.

An example here: https://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum...o-to-exakt-a-world-first.232226/#post-3770244
 
Am sorry, you don't really have a complete 'set' unless you also own the IBLs. ;)

It's the only Naim speaker that I still own (having lived with SBLs and DBLs, the latter for 20 years!).
 


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