Furrowedbrow
pfm Member
Been thinking of upgrading from my trusty Quad 909, so have started looking at Naim amps. I must say I find some of their recommendations and ethos a bit suspect, such as:
1) Needing to use their own speaker cables for impedance matching: Surely the amplifiers are designed to handle complex impedances of many different speakers, so why is the low impedance cable so key!? Am I missing something here?
2) Spending thousands on a power amp and then having upgrade PSU’s which look just like very simple regulated supplies. Surely an amp costing a few thousand should already come with a decent PSU, if it really has a big impact on sound quality? The NAPSC I looked at contained a very basic ‘hobby electronics’ PSU using LM317 regs. Simple stuff and very inexpensive, so no idea whay this can’t be included in say a NAC202 to start with.
3) This doesn’t apply to just Naim I guess, but for digital sources, no amount of preamp can be better than not having a preamp at all! I’ve been running the Quad directly from a Dac and it sounds fantastic. Is a Naim preamp really needed to get the best from their power amps?
Happy to hear your thoughts.
1) Needing to use their own speaker cables for impedance matching: Surely the amplifiers are designed to handle complex impedances of many different speakers, so why is the low impedance cable so key!? Am I missing something here?
2) Spending thousands on a power amp and then having upgrade PSU’s which look just like very simple regulated supplies. Surely an amp costing a few thousand should already come with a decent PSU, if it really has a big impact on sound quality? The NAPSC I looked at contained a very basic ‘hobby electronics’ PSU using LM317 regs. Simple stuff and very inexpensive, so no idea whay this can’t be included in say a NAC202 to start with.
3) This doesn’t apply to just Naim I guess, but for digital sources, no amount of preamp can be better than not having a preamp at all! I’ve been running the Quad directly from a Dac and it sounds fantastic. Is a Naim preamp really needed to get the best from their power amps?
Happy to hear your thoughts.