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Anybody tried these Ebay DR clones?

colasblue

colasblue

pfm Member
www.ebay.co.uk

NAIM DR Output +24V | eBay

This is a third-party product, not from the original NAIM product. Transforming the original HICAP is relatively simple, as long as the corresponding wire joints are welded.
www.ebay.co.uk

I currently have an old 42 on the bench in the process of being fettled with a view to making it into something credible.

I could see my way towards getting a couple of these and fitting them into a Popley box with suitable traffo and caps at that price point to make a 4 rail supply. I couldn't really justify shelling out for 4 rails worth of Avondale or JJ's regs.

Anybody tried them?
 
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I've not tried them, but are they really clones? They even have Naim on the boards!

I didn't realise the DR versions were quite so complex, plenty of SMDs on the back of those boards.
 
They do not look like the originals I have seen, but very close... Now they are sold out, are they anywhere else available?
 
It's at the very least trademark infringement. Trade with criminals at your peril. I'm astonished Naim doesn't get this stuff pulled from eBay.
 
The same seller has quite a few other copy boards which look to have just been re-drawn from originals.

I suspect the only thing Naim can actually copyright is the logo and I'm sure plenty of us have built kit out of these "copy" boards in the past. The Jims audio nap140 board was certainly very popular.

This DR board is an entirely different level though. I somehow just can't imagine a thing of that complexity being produced by a small time outfit in relatively small quantities. It's way beyond any previous DIY offerings we've seen.

It made me wonder if you actually get what's shown in the picture.

Somebody's bought it (wasn't me) so maybe we'll get some feedback soon.

If it's a real item and any good I expect it will be popular.
 
colasblue said:
The same seller has quite a few other copy boards which look to have just been re-drawn from originals.

I suspect the only thing Naim can actually copyright is the logo and I'm sure plenty of us have built kit out of these "copy" boards in the past. The Jims audio nap140 board was certainly very popular.

This DR board is an entirely different level though. I somehow just can't imagine a thing of that complexity being produced by a small time outfit in relatively small quantities. It's way beyond any previous DIY offerings we've seen.

It made me wonder if you actually get what's shown in the picture.

Somebody's bought it (wasn't me) so maybe we'll get some feedback soon.

If it's a real item and any good I expect it will be popular.
Click to expand...

Naim have both the logo and the text registered separately so they are comprehensively covered - use of the word Naim in any text, font or style in the registered classes by anyone other than the trademark holder is an infringement.

Imagine if you could only copyright a logo - how many different offerings of Coca Cola, McDonalds and Nike do you think there would be?

Again, do business with criminals at your peril. When someone is offering a product that knowingly infringes a trademark, why would you expect them to have any ethics at all?
 
Copyright infringement in China is rife and prosecutions are rarely successful.

The best Naim could expect is the same boards without the logo or text. You can see why they don't bother can't you.

The DIY world is full of copy boards from various original manufacturers which are widely used. People even make cottage industry businesses out of assembling and selling equipment made from them.

Without such products the DIY room would not exist.

FWIW any cheap Chinese Blu ray player you buy in Tescos for £50 probably infringes a dozen or more copyrights, patents and licenses but does play pretty much all discs.

This is an issue which has pretty much put western AV equipment manufacturers who "do it by the book" out of business.

The "criminality" you complain about is actually becoming pretty much the norm.

It even extends to the respectable end of the hi-fi industry to some extent. Eg all Benchmark DACS (and probably most others based on ESS chips) have HDCD decoding but nowhere is that mentioned in the manual and no HDCD logo is present. I assume its down to them not wanting to pay for the license!
 
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May I also remind that copyright laws are widely used for strategic considerations: not in the first place to protect and support innovation, but to push competitors out of the market etc.

I am not talking about Naim. Still I doubt it's easily possible for them to get their circuits patented. Regular product protection yes, but the cloner can change a small detail and sell it as a different product. There are a lot of very similar products that do not violate each others protection.

So better would be to hide the knowledge, for example using 4layer PCBs to make it more difficult to copy the circuit, and/or embed parts of the product into black epoxy etc.
 
Well that's certainly been done before by manufacturers such as Lavardin. You then get problems with servicing equipment. Their classic reply in one case was - "We can't fix it, We don't know what the components were and the designer is dead so we can't ask."

Naim have made their power amp range above the 200 virtually impossible to copy through the use of bespoke power transistors with unusual characteristics.

I will not knowingly buy any such equipment since it's potentially a paperweight if it fails after the manufacturer is out of business.
 
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colasblue said:
Copyright infringement in China is rife and prosecutions are rarely successful.

The best Naim could expect is the same boards without the logo or text. You can see why they don't bother can't you.

The DIY world is full of copy boards from various original manufacturers which are widely used. People even make cottage industry businesses out of assembling and selling equipment made from them.

Without such products the DIY room would not exist.

FWIW any cheap Chinese Blu ray player you buy in Tescos for £50 probably infringes a dozen or more copyrights, patents and licenses but does play pretty much all discs.

This is an issue which has pretty much put western AV equipment manufacturers who "do it by the book" out of business.

The "criminality" you complain about is actually becoming pretty much the norm.

It even extends to the respectable end of the hi-fi industry to some extent. Eg all Benchmark DACS (and probably most others based on ESS chips) have HDCD decoding but nowhere is that mentioned in the manual and no HDCD logo is present. I assume its down to them not wanting to pay for the license!
Click to expand...

You're confusing copyrights with patents. Selling equipment with copy boards is one thing, passing off that equipment using a name and trademark you don't own is something else. And there's no serious comparison between hobbyist DIYers and the sort of highly professional counterfeiting operations in China. I have personal experience of being bootlegged and pirated and trust me, it is infuriating when criminals parasite off your efforts, it's akin to being robbed.
 
In which country is the HiCap DR module made? When Hicap DR was first announced, there was a Chinese quality inspection sticker on the back of the module, which I thought was strange.
 
Nobody is passing these boards off as the real thing, even though they have the logo on them.

If they are actually normally made in China then perhaps it's an OEM product leaking out (in which case they're actually not fake or copies).

They just seem a bit too complex to be worth copying in small quantities.
 
To be fair I doubt many people are sending their non-DR equipment back to Naim these days to be DR upgraded. In fact I don't think Naim are even offering this service anymore. Therefore these clone boards aren't really losing Naim any business.
Also the "old classic" range that used this design is well into process of being phased out, so this is really a legacy design now anyway.
 
I think Naim actually lost a great deal of potential business by refusing to DR olive and CB power supplies. I'm sure Teddy Pardo was absolutely rubbing his hands with delight at that decision.
 
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colasblue said:
This DR board is an entirely different level though. I somehow just can't imagine a thing of that complexity being produced by a small time outfit in relatively small quantities. It's way beyond any previous DIY offerings we've seen.

It made me wonder if you actually get what's shown in the picture.

Somebody's bought it (wasn't me) so maybe we'll get some feedback soon.

If it's a real item and any good I expect it will be popular.
Click to expand...

It’s actually really cheap to have boards assembled in low quantities, something like a fraction of cent per component.
 
I see a lot of things like this on eBay, Ali Express etc.
All 'base on' [sic] Naim circuitry. But without any of the layout considerations, component selection, testing procedure or attention to detail that, you know, Naim actually do (or at least did once). I do wonder if any of the amps are unconditionally stable or whether they just cut and paste the Naim circuit.
 
It's almost impossible to clone an old through hole design these days. Too many parts discontinued.
Just substituting parts into a fussy circuit like most power amplifiers is asking for trouble.
 
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