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Knocking Naim!

AndrewM said:
I suspect right at the beginning it made sense to keep costs down on a two box system by taking the power from a tap on the massive traffo in the power-amp. Then someone spotted an improvement by substituting a separate power supply. Then someone spotted a goldmine..... and the rest was history (no inside knowledge but my best guess).
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The first separates was to split out the low-level preamplification from the then standard integrated amp and call it a control unit. Thus the same power supply was still used but the low-level signals were isolated. I designed and built an amp like this over 35 years ago.

Naim used to let its engineers take home bits of kit to experiment in fact Naim actually encouraged 'fiddling' with their kit as this is from where much of the innovation came. Naim noticed that the engineers were using the large xformers from the 250/135s to build a separate power supply for the NACs and the HiCap was born.

That's as best as I can remember as a lot of this past history seems to have disappeared or at least not easy to find.

Cheers,

DV
 
John said:
Not surprising to me as he is the same bloke who heard no difference with a Mana support.
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I was as surprised as Joe about the XPS; to not hear any difference surprises me quite a lot.

Like it or not I too found that Mana changed the way things sounded, but actually the XPS finding surprises me even more...:confused:
 
Gerald said:
I would wholeheartedly agree with you if there was transparency of information .

If each box had an accurate breakdown of what it cost to make and were retail price went I would have no problem with their pricing .

Something tells me though that they would sell very few if they did .
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Decades ago, when I was involved in the business, I remember being surprised to see that the 3 most expensive individual components in the product were the case, the power transformer and the instruction manual.
It doesn't surprise me that the bigger power supplies are expensive, since they use the same(ish) case and a bigger transformer. The power supply boxes may even be more expensive to make than the units they power in many cases, even though they contain fewer parts.
Whether it is good to make 2 boxes when 1 will do is another question.

Back then the manufacturing cost of the product was about 10% of retail, the rest of the cost being R&D, engineering design, styling, tooling, overhead and profit. Pretty well the same as cars.
 
Bob,

I was as surprised as Joe:
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Did you raise your right eyebrow all quizzical-like? I do that when I'm surprised, but I save raising both eyebrows to indicate fascination.

Joe
 
If you look at the flatcap internal pic, you'll see a pair of three legged components mounted on the rear panel.
These are 317 voltage regulators in the cheapest form. You don't see them in other standalone Naim PSU.

So much for parts commonality.

If transformer and case are the most costly bits why not fit same regulators as those in the Hicap?

Exposure fit canned regulators and 10000uF capacitors even in their non standalone power supplies.
 
Flatcap probably £30 if that for internal components and 40 for the case, remember Naim would be buying in bulk so mega discounts would apply.
 
F1eng said:
Back then the manufacturing cost of the product was about 10% of retail, the rest of the cost being R&D, engineering design, styling, tooling, overhead and profit. Pretty well the same as cars.
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I can assure you that mark ups in the car components business are VERY thin
 
So the price of art is paint?

Cost to manufacture a software cd is pennies ...

Why wouldn't the same logic apply to HiFi, specially when people are prepared to pay the prices?
 
R&D on the flatcap?

It came from the application note of the regulator manufacturer.

A bit like Naim making and selling pancakes and the R&D is simply following the instructions on the pancake mix box.
 
Here we go again.
A ( never ending?) discussion on Naim equipment. Just accept (a) some people love it and (b) others don't. I own one piece of Naim kit, a CD player. It works well, but I have no desire to add an Naim amplifier. My Quad works well for me. End of story. Well, mine anyway...
 
Evil Emperor said:
If I am truly honest with myself, since I moved away from Naim, I find myself listening more to the sound music makes than the music itself. There's an interrupt between the music and me that simply wasn't there when I was using Naim, so I'll probably come full circle one day. This is not unique to Naim, but Naim at its best encapsulates beautifully. Why there is some extra link to the music that is hard to attain elsewhere remains unclear, and will doubtless be dismissed as sentimental nonsense by those who think music is something to be endured between test tones. Nevertheless, my feelings on the matter stand.
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This is the reason why I moved to Naim products. I come from Bel Canto products before Naim. It wasn't difficult to notice the differences when I first time plugged in the SuperNait.

Yes, you can probably extract more details and better soundstaging out of your system with many other manufacturers but the flow of the music and pure excitement are on their own level with Naim produts.
 
I myself use a 1990 made Naim nat 02 tuner it replaced a Accuphase T1000

Dont miss the accuphase one bit!

Its excellent !
 
I run a full Naim/Linn system, which I enjoy immensely. I appreciate the pros and cons of other kit, but the system I run suits my preferences. I really couldn't give a flying **** what anyone else thinks TBH. My money, my vote. What is VFM for one person is a rip-off for another. If people don't like the products Naim produces, they are not obliged to buy them.

I do find the regularity and monotony of these threads extremely funny though.
 
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