How High End Audio is made - Factory Visit NAIM Audio - UK
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 พ.ย. 2024
- How is a high-end amplifier or streamer made? What does it take to create a NAIM Statement amplifier? Why do cables get shaken in the NAIM-factory? We take a look at the production process at the NAIM factory.
- วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
The attention to detail is crazy. hearing the evolution of their workflow and discoveries is fascinating. Thanks.
Naim’s mantra has always been; great audio should be affordable to everyone, not a select few! Their entire line of products proves that point, from modest entry level, to no holds-barred high end. Naim’s design provides the owner of using either unbalanced RCA or balanced DIN/XLR connection. This is a feature that usually is only featured on expensive equipment, but Naim gives owners their choice, by including both! Audiophiles swear by DIN/XLRs. I love both Jeff Rowland & Nelson Pass line equipment, which are outstanding. But their cost is prohibitive, or hard to swallow for most enthusiasts. They focus on what’s audibly important & avoid any overkill, which isn’t necessary. Their look is modest, but their performance is as serious as it gets! Multi inspection processes insure a flawless product is delivered. They prove you don’t need to be wealthy, just wise🎼👍🏆.
well, i find their components quite expensive, also compared to other great sounding brands.
Naim is hardly affordable , what mansion do you live in ?
I like my cable, shaken, not stirred
😄 🤣 😂 😆
Great video and loved hearing some of that detail about their use of DIN.
Thanks!
DEUTSCHES INSTITUT FÜR NORMUNG
@@TheAlphaAudio
Accuphase
Very well done and appreciated, being myself anowner of several Naim kits from 1984.
Thanks!
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@Will Hunter Instablaster ;)
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Great video... I toured the Naim factory 10 years ago. So much attention to detail. Some of the finest electrical and mechanical engineering in the industry.
Definately!
Accuphase
Love Naim. 👍🏆🇬🇧 Rega, Naim & Focal. Now am happy 🎼
Accuphase
I love Naim and Gryphon Audio
Accuphase
if there is a better sounding hifi brand outt there, I haven't heard it
Accuphase
Luxman.
@@vandemon9643
McIntosh
There is one thing i remember from DIN cables in the early 70's is, that they were very prone to failure due to askew pins or loose solderings. I was glad when i got a system with RCA plugs. The transition was not only a cost reduction excersize.
they had more hum too
You've missed the point, in a naim circuit dins sound better than RCAs because they have a common ground, full stop.
Loose solderings are a sign of lack of soldering skills at the manufacturer, it can happen with RCA, DIN or in a washing machine and has nothing to do with DIN or RCA in the first place.
You also get a signed photograph of the people who helped building the kit.
DIN5180 explanation here @13 mins should be added to the Manuals.
Why was star grounding chosen rather than balanced XLR?
Mains questions, the standard cord vs powerline, etc.
Naim could be much more helpful in all these set up subjects.
few premium brands, McIntosh comes to mind truly make everything in-house ... vertical integration. McIntosh even bends the metal and cuts the glass for their cases in the factory... anything outsourced is usually outsourced right there in NY State, absolutely avoiding anything from China when possible.. Naim and dSC are the two closest to this in the UK.... glad to see them employing well treated and well paid workers.
I am loving your videos and content. Keep up the great work!
I found putting my source/electronics a long way from the speakers was the best form of Isolation 🙂
getting my supernaint 3 tomorrow, lets see how this rolls with the sopras 1!
Any feedback on your experience? Thanks.
May not agree with the "shaking cables" bit but I like his statement about RCA cables being "audio jewelry". I used DIN plugs for years and they're great connectors and save a ton of space and money. I used LEMO connectors on early Mark Levinson gear. Gullible Audiophools have been sucked in by Snake-oil RCA cable manufacturers pricing them above components.
Yeah, I love Naim, but shaking cables? C'mon man. It doesn't matter if you shake a cable, cryogenically freeze it, bake it at 350 for an hour a foot, or put it on a spaceship and orbit it around the moon, cables don't matter.
@@blendtecbrah5761 As I've mentioned in a reply further down this thread, the shaking of cables came about because we, the people that listened to every naim product and made the final decisions as to what made the best sound (for us) heard the difference it made.
It's subjective, a matter of taste, not scientific, and we never pretended otherwise.
@@marktucker4528 I believe you when you say you heard the difference it made, that it was subjective, a matter of taste, and not scientific. But could you tell a shaken from an unshaken cable in an ABx test, consistently, at an accuracy higher than that of just guessing? Probably not, and I bet you're ok with that ;)
In your defense; I get it. Audiophile stuff is fun. I used to subscribe to all of it, and once even lusted after a $32k pair of Transparent cables that I now know/believe perform no better or worse than lamp cord.
@@blendtecbrah5761 My four listening-team colleagues and I could consistently, in completely blind tests, tell you every time which cable sounded best; we might not know at that point which was shaken and which wasn't, that was only known by whomever we had entrusted to 'run' the test, but when we compared each of our results, because we always did such tests individually before doing them together as a group, we could accurately rate the cables in order by correlating which cable (or any other hi-fi component) we had all chosen and in which order.
We sometimes had to listen to twenty or more cables in a single test session, to assess the merits of a new cable manufacturer, or a new connector, or a new type of solder, or the direction in which the cable sounded best, etc.
These processes could take several weeks, sometime months, of exhaustive and thorough back and forth listening to ensure that we weren’t mistaken, and to make sure that we were all choosing the same sample of whatever it was we were listing to. Honestly, we really did this, for decades.
As far as your comment about audiophiles, we never, ever considered ourselves audiophiles. We hated hi-fi for hi-fi’s sake, naim systems were always designed to be a means to an end, a tool for enjoying recorded music, nothing more, not audio jewellery and frippery to feed one-upmanship, and we never subscribed to what we mostly considered to be over-priced, under-performing ‘miracle’ products.
To this end, if you knew naim as it was through the seventies, eighties, nineties, and noughties, you might have noticed that we always included what we genuinely considered to be the best interconnect cables, power cables (with selected, hand-fitted 13amp plugs), and source connections with every product, included in the price.
We also designed and had manufactured our own speaker cable/s, and our own connectors to be fitted to them, in order to eliminate as many variables as possible when putting together a naim based system.
There was never much profit in these items for the company, they were usually included at cost, and I know of no other manufacturer, before or since, that went to the same lengths as we did in this pursuit.
What all of this did was eliminate the need for our customers to enter the minefield of painful and often criminally expensive trial and error research into such ‘ancillaries’.
A naim system could be built, from source to loudspeakers, with every single link in the chain having been tailored - upon optimum sound quality, not just technical requirements - from start to finish, with no need whatsoever to throw the resulting sound to chance by experimenting with the hundreds and thousands of interconnects, connectors, and speaker cables available world-wide.
And I stress, yes, there were those of us at naim who could consistently and reliably hear the differences and choose the same cable, or pre-amp, or cd player, or even humble mains fuses, time after time after time in completely random, blind tests.
You don’t have to believe me, that’s your choice, but I know this is true, I lived and breathed it for the best part of four decades.
Apologies for the lengthy diatribe. 😅
@@marktucker4528 No need to apologize. I do truly believe that you and your colleagues "heard" a difference. However, the placebo effect is very much a real thing, and I question whether a properly calibrated measurement microphone and RTA would "hear" the same difference. Perhaps that answer will be forever lost to time.
My continued skepticism aside, I applaud your team's efforts. There was a time when I might have labored with the same fervor to deliver the so-called Absolute Sound, but these days I call it a day at a system that just sounds really good. A really good sounding system might be a Naim source and amplification, speakers from Dynaudio or Pro-Ac, and whatever cables that looked nice and weren't frightfully expensive. Alternatively, a Naim streamer and some active DSP speakers from Kii or Meridian would do the trick as well.
Very interesting video J.
Nice video! Naim is my love :)
Dream jobs! This is military standards level of production, with work being done by human beings.
Do you have a reference to an article describing the ABX test mentioned that proofs shaking cables results in such audible differences?
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” - Carl Sagan
"an RCA plug is 200 ohms" 12:35 ... False, it's more like 25 for the basic/standard ones. There's a couple of (cold welded/crimped instead of soldered) HiFi RCA cables out there with a true / symmetrical 75 ohm impedance (including the plugs). And for frequencies we see in analogue audio, sufficient. Issues start to appear in the radio frequency spectrum (multi-Megahertz / Gigahertz).
It originated from the phono cable and was meant for audio signals. Yes, it was also used as DC-coupler, but this was not its primary use. RCA stands for: Radio Corporation of America... they were not in lighting business.
Yes RCA is not ideal. For easier matching use a BNC connector, you know those that were used for old coax computer networks. Originally meant for RF and video connections. They come in 50 and 75 ohm flavours.
What a bunch of lies.
We could set up a test...
When is this test happening .
It's not lies, it's what we found to be true, as opposed to what you believe to be true.
The shaking of cables came about because we, the people that listened to every naim product and made the final decisions as to what made the best sound (for us) heard the difference it made.
It's subjective, a matter of taste, not scientific, and we never pretended otherwise.
As for RCAs and DINS, etc, the din is simply a better connector in a naim circuit because it has a common ground, plus RCAs affect phase relationships - once more, proven to ourselves time and again by listening tests, not effectively meaningless measurements (in terms of sound quality).
As for BNCs, we used them too, for the phono input on naim amplifiers, because there was an obvious improvement in sound over DINs and RCAs.
The only reason naim eventually changed to using RCA's for most of it's input connections is because the people who bought the company are only interested in commercial gain, not sound quality, and RCAs made it easier to sell naim in a market full of lazy retailers, most of whom couldn't, or wouldn't, solder a din plug on properly.
If you don't like naim's story, stance, nor methods of design and manufacture, don't buy any, simple as that. You choose, you lose ...
Naim was never intended for people like you, it was for people that loved music and used their ears to tell them what was good to listen to.
@@marktucker4528 But why not rule out bias from sighted tests and make sure you don't spend time and effort where improvements are only in the brain of the (primed) beholder? I would imagine a company priding itself in engineering excellence is able to perform proper experiments to prove or falsify an hypothesis about what might contribute to better sound reproduction.
But you must be right, because I'm critical and have a scientific mindset means I must not love music because those two are mutually exclusive... /s
@@Prophet1cus Please read my other responses in this thread re: ruling out visual and/or priming bias.
As for measuring every effect we hear, since you have a scientific mindset, you should know that science cannot (yet) explain or measure everything. Surely you're aware of this?
There are some measurements that we were able to perform that pointed towards reasons for certain effects being heard, but they were too inconclusive for us to rely on them alone. Think along the lines of materials stress introduced during manufacture that affect microphony, and reflections in connectors, for example.
Other reasons and measurements that we believed we could back up with good science we preferred - and still prefer - to keep to ourselves, for reasons of intellectual property rights in a highly competitive market. Why give away all your hard-earned knowledge?
You commented originally, aggressively and accusingly, with the singular intention of discrediting the company and a loose explanation being made to interested customers by a non-scientific employee, who was simply describing as best he could why we did certain things a certain way - all without giving away too many trade secrets.
Had you been there you could have asked more detailed questions if you'd wished to and the company would have tried, wherever possible, to provide you with more information, within the constraints outlined above.
Just because you can't see the point, nor accept what people's ears alone tell them - even in the absence of a scientifically provable explanation - doesn't mean it's not true and isn't genuinely audible.
Good science is all based on observation and empirical experiments, followed eventually, hopefully, by a scientific theory to back it up. This process can take years, decades, centuries, ad infinitum, to reach a conclusive, peer reviewable scientific explanation.
Good science also changes its position and adjusts its stance when presented with genuine new evidence.
My comment about the love of music aimed to point out that we, and hundreds of thousands of happy naim customers world-wide, let the sound we perceive help us decide whether or not something is good or better, without basing our opinions purely on science nor specifications, nor the word of someone else, nor the word of reviewers, critics, other manufacturers, etc.
If it sounds good, it IS good. We can/may find out why later on.
I can't tell you how many audio engineers and acousticians I've met in over forty-five years in the audio, studio, and music industries, many of them very smart people, but there have been dozens and dozens of them, and when they've presented me with their theories and explanations, backed up by all sorts of graphs, formulae, and 'scientific' explanations, only for me to have a listen to their product and find that it sounded execrable in the vast majority of cases, in my humble opinion, I (and all my colleagues) always concluded that listening should come first.
So as we always said, and this includes by some of the finest engineering minds in the business who graced naim with their genius, trust your ears.
P.S. Perhaps take a look at this video for a brief explanation on naim's philosophy and methods, not least from one of the cleverest people I've ever known, the delightful and talented Roy George, the company's chief designer and technical director extraordinaire.
th-cam.com/video/aj5nxyeOSoE/w-d-xo.html
Naim amplifiers look like they are directly taken from a Klingon warbird.. Nice video. With that level of knowledge and experience this company should start making active speaker systems together with Focal (maybe they already are...).
I asked that... They didn't really answer... ;-)
The worst thing that ever happened to naim was getting into bed with Focal in 2011.
The only people that benefitted were the eventual share holders, who've made an awful lot of money over the subsequent years, whilst churning out poorer and poorer products and offering poorer and poorer customer service ...
Thanks! Nice video....
Does the entry level Niam Mu-so Qb 2nd Generation sound good? I was told that it is special..thanks!
I haven't tested it yet.
@@TheAlphaAudio Thank you!
Very informative. Thank you.
I first encountered Naim in '95 at a dealer. He had SBLs dressed in beech and I assume a 72/250 or perhaps much better? Whatever. I daresay one was suitably impressed. However I think Naim should dial back the Prat on the Supernait. Its a little relentless especially at higher volumes.
'PRAT' is not a term ever used by naim, nor a design principle, so no product was designed around it.
The acronym was originally coined by certain members of the hi-fi press and some naim users on social media platforms, arbitrarily, and is not something that any of us at naim listened for nor recognised as relevant.
It always was, and hopefully still is, meaningless to anyone at naim who was involved in the sound of products.
@@marktucker4528 very interesting to hear that - what design principles or terms does naim listen for or recognize as relevant?
@@rd264 Hi,
The main point with my comment was that so many things are said with "authority", about what manufacturers use as their design principles, or as their reference, without ever really knowing what said manufacturer actually does.
In reality, all of us at naim who were involved in the design and decision processes as to what was the way we wanted a product to sound, during the key decades of the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and early 2010s, were listening for the ability to make timing clear, and also the tune.
By the tune, I mean whether or not instruments were in tune (sometimes they're not meant to be), and whether or not they were in tune with each other, or the vocalist/s if any were present/featured.
It sounds a bit trite and possibly immature now, after almost 50 years of promoting these "references" as a way of judging hi-fi components - or even, more importantly, live performances - but a few basic principles were, and in my case still are, all that we needed to decide if a system or its components were worth building or buying.
Arugably, and there will be millions of people who disagree, and whom would prefer to judge hi-fi by measurements, statistics, stereo imaging, etc, etc, ad nauseam, as a manufacturer, or somebody who works for said manufacturer and believes in its principles, you owe it to your company, yourself, and anyone out there who's looking for the same things, to stick to what you believe in, not whatever anyone else tells you is important.
I repeat, PRAT is an acronym invented by people who never truly understood what naim was about, even though the same people might have been naim fans and owners.
As an almost lifelong musician and singer myself, pace, rhythm, and timing are pretty much the same things, when you think about it?
And manufacturers cannot "dial these things up", they can only reveal the way the musicians played when a recording was made.
I have heard it now.shaking cables and it's unmeasurable the differances. Well it's a marketing tool if nothing else😉
It's free... So why is it a marketing tool? Anyone can do it at home.
Amazing sound these systems.
Is there any kind of paint for a scratched Naim equipment? Thanks
There must be. Check your supplier...
As a Naim employee I can advise you that the products are powder coated not wet painted.
So this explains why Naimies are Naimies
One of those cables was upside down in the shaker. All the electrons are going to fall out!
There is something about Naim. I buy other high end stuff... compare it with my Naim... and always go back to it.
So why you buy any other hi end stuff anyway if your Naim sounds so great? ;) (I'm Naim owner too so please mind that :))
Because audiophiles don't have the experience or education to understand what matters (the skill of the original recording engineer, the choice of loudspeakers, their placement in a room and the acoustics of that room), audiophiles spend fortunes on the wrong things, which are the high-profit-margin and well advertised items like cables, power conditioners, amplifiers, power cables, connectors, resistors, and just about everything that has almost nothing to do with the quality of reproduced music - but makes loads of money for the people selling these fetishes.
Well: yes, acoustics matter a LOT... totally agree. But the combination of amplifier and speakers are very important as well. That's why active speakers sound so good: they are made for each other. On the other hand; people need a hobby. And this is great stuff to toy around with.
Imagine thinking an amplifier doesn’t matter
💚💚💚💚Naim
NAIM is caring about their sound signature, not about natural sound reproduction.
I love the Naim sound, but I often wonder why the Hi-Fi units have to look like military equipment.
Originally it was to keep the price down - cosmetics that didn't enhance the sound were considered entirely superfluous
Times have changed, of course, and the present owners of the company have an entirely different agenda, so products made since the early two thousands have had a great deal more attention paid purely to the cosmetics, inevitably raising the prices by a substantial amount.
I preferred the 'middle ground' era of the late eighties and nineties, when the appearance of products was given just enough attention, with no over-the-top design engineering, which added hugely to prices in later decades.
The only engineering fact in this video is the guy testing each component for noise. The rest, you might as well have a Buddha giving each amplifier his blessing as it passes by. Classic audiowankery justification for shaking interconnects "we can't measure what changes, but you can hear it" -yeah. Right. As for phono leads vs DIN - just use XLR balanced leads, as that's what everything you hear has passed through dozens, if not hundreds of times during recording instead of making up nonsense about reflections in a 2ft length of cable at audio frequencies. BTW, I've worked at a well-known mixing desk company and you know what - all your precious audio is sent back and forth along the bus through standard IDC cable (yep, the same stuff that connects your floppy drive to your computer), and the components on the strips are just bog standard transistors, capacitors and resistors used in any other electronic device - suited to the application of course (e.g. low distortion and low noise op-amps where they make a difference). But hey, after traveling through all that, I'm sure the pseudo-science in your amp makes all the difference. I'm not saying Naim don't make good amplifiers, but if they are good, it's because of well-known electronic design principles, and not some quasi-religious chanting ceremony as they leave the factory.
If electrons flow more efficiently in flexible cables what happens when they travel through rigid, right-angled solder tracks on a circuit board?
@@spudpud-T67😂😂 cute...gotta love delusional "audiophiles"
I love this snake oil video
Does anyone know how to take off the cover of a Naim unit such as the Unitilite? Thanks!
Don't do that yourself lol...
And i tought i was crazy :) Am Glad that some true believers exist in HIFI
"believers" like the ones that believe in flat earth .. Hardly a compliment 😅😅😅
Why bother testing 317 and 337 regulators?
Just go DR for the whole range.
Talk smack about RCA connectors but you run power through DIN alongside signal.
You're missing the point, as so many non-naim employees and non-engineers do ...
i had Naim amps (42 / 250) in the 1980's with my first LP12 and Sara's and Isobariks, before going Linn active. this all looks very cottage industry and basic compared to the Linn factory tour video
What a immensly cool system that must have been at the time!
Linn were helped enormously by substantial government grants over the decades, to build high-tech production, warehousing, and admin facilities, whilst naim - because it is based in the south of England and not in Scotland - received zero help from anyone outside the company.
Every penny invested in naim's progression, up until 2011, came entirely from the two founders and their tiny band of employee-shareholders.
Despite this, in no small part because the owners weren't too greedy, naim somehow always managed to be at the absolute leading edge of many technologies, and owned the very best in production and testing equipment in the areas where these mattered most.
This factory term name totally doesn’t warrant the price of their equipment. The sound is great compare that to another English manufacturer Rege and they are an engineering firm. Take their factory tour and you’ll see 100% difference of professionalism, and explaining what they do in Laymans terms, as well as engineering terms name finds out a difficult to explain which is no excuse. Enjoy the video guys but just remember you’re paying a ton of money and you want to make sure the back up is where it’s supposed to be and I am an order and then so put that aside.
Naim display / Oled will be ruined within 3 years time. The Naim Logo will appeared water marks over time. Humming of the amplifier.
OMG! What a crock.
You can hear the difference but you cant measure it, what a load of BS.
If you have found out how to measure all aspects of audio... Please write a paper on it and publish it. I guess it will make you world famous.
@@TheAlphaAudio Audio frequencies are measurable as is the frequency response of the human ear. The onus is on you to measure what you claim to hear or it is not science. Just SnakeOilAudio.
@@AirCrash1 if you think that is all...
The camera person is useless! Guy explaining stuff and camera pointed at him constantly, even when he says 'look at this'!
Thanks.
boring
Not impressed with the camerawork and editing. Disappointing.
Sorry to disappoint you with this free content.
This was actually shot months ago - pre corona - as b-roll. Now I thought using it anyway for this... Just as a bonus.
Anyway... You don't like it. What can I do... I'm not a trained cameraman.
@@TheAlphaAudio you did well
C’est un gag l’histoire des câbles « secoués » ?! Il y a des gogos pour gober de telles conneries ? Du coup je n’achèterai jamais du Naim
You could add more shots and photos (stills) of equipment he was talking about, not just the guy. He could talk in "off".