Naim at High End 2015

[Jason]

Naim’s display at the High End show in Munich focussed on its NAP power amplifiers, most of which have benefitted from Statement tech trickledown. This comes in the form of the NA009 transistor developed for the range topping S1 mono power amps, which is quite a serious slice of silicon. Naim’s engineers took a year to investigate how to make a better output device and ended up building adjacent die matching from the same silicon wafer. Most sets of transistors are made using silicon from different dies and are matched as closely as possible by measurement, sets of NA009 devices have significantly tighter tolerances because of their “single estate” origin. In the case of the new DR series NAP amps the selection process is not quite as rigorous as it is with Statement but the improvement will undoubtedly be significant.

They are also made entirely with non-ferrous materials because where you have high currents running in parallel through the legs they literally vibrate with each large pulse of current drawn by the speaker. An effect that is dramatically reduced with non-ferrous legs.

The other big change is indicated by the DR suffix, this as you may know is the regulator upgrade that went into Naim’s outboard power supplies a couple of years ago. Now it has been engineered to give the power supplies in the NAP range 30x lower noise than the existing models. The DR regulator also has lower dynamic impedance, which means the power supply is more resilient to changes in output demands required by the loudspeaker. There are naturally separate DR regulated power supplies for each channel.

The NAP 250 DR and NAP 300 DR will be available in June with the NAP 500 DR coming on stream in August. Prices will rise slightly in each instance compared to current models, for example the NAP 250 DR will be £3,495. The NAP 200 DR will not be getting the NA009 transistors nor does it use regulated supply rails it will however have a DR power supply module for attached preamplifiers.

Owners of tryptich or new look cased NAP 250, 300 and 500 power amps will be able to have them upgraded to DR standard at the end of the year.