Hi all

I have been a subscriber of the magazine for a couple of years now and love it. Keep up the good work guys!
I started my Hifi journey with a modest Naim Unitiqute2. Since then the bug has bit and the system has made many changes sticking with Naim in a fairly short period of time.
My system now comprises of an NDX2, NAC282, NAP250DR, HiCapDR, all on a full Naim Fraim with Powerlines and a Super Lumina Din-Din interconnect.

The system is wonderful and brings me hours and hours of joy.
However having made many changes, each bringing wonderful improvements along the way, one always feels the need to explore and research what’s the next upgrade possibility.

Is this generally just a Naim trait, with their vast product range and clever modular approach or dose this mindset apply to whichever brand of equipment you own.

I feel that if I owned a system from a company that had a smaller product catalog with far bigger price differences, I would be more content with what I’ve got.

Anyone know how to deal with this madness and many left the Naim train?😂

Best

Popeye

Tricky one. I stepped off the Naim Train quite some time ago; in fact not too long after getting on it :-). That's perhaps not strictly fair, but I went through quite a long period of upgrade-itis, and to be honest I was never that happy - I was always worrying about "the system" and not the music. It's when I stepped off Planet Flat Earth Hifi and started actually listening to the music that I relaxed a lot and just started enjoying what I was hearing. I think that, for me, there were three big steps I made that "solved" my upgrade-itis and just started me listening to music instead...

Step 1 was cleaning up the mains, and getting rid of the electrical noise. A PS Audio Power Plant, and shielded mains cables. I would recommend that combination to anybody. Once you've lived with it for a bit, it's a no-brainer. Also taking care routing your interconnects, and so on. Electrical noise is the single biggest evil, IMHO... It's worth spending time on, you don't need to spend a lot of money[1] (well, except for the power plant, obviously :-)).

Step 2 was throwing the active pre-amp in the bin, and going with a transformer-coupled passive. Music First, in my case, others (Townshend) are available. You can discuss their relatiove merits, I think that Martin and I did so at some point, but what they both offer is something very different to the traditional active pre, and both are thoroughly musical.

Step 3 was to throw away loudpeakers with a cross-over at about 2KHz, right in the middle of the human voice where the ear is most senstive. Yeah, you can get used to a good crossover, and some are very good, but I'm kinda with the much-missed Paul Messenger in thinking that the best crossover is no crossover. Many years ago, straight after student-hood, I was spoiled by a little pair of Robin Marshall's Epos ES11s, which ran the one driver full-range and just rolled in a tweeter at about 5KHz. After some fairly unhappy conventional speaker choices (and people say nice things about ProAcs, for example) I'm currently very happy with Martin Logan panels, which run one driver from 250Hz up, and fill in at the bottom with an auxiliary bass unit. Yes, I have just (well 11 months ago) upgraded them (after 10 years, to another 20 year old pair) but that's because I wanted "more" of everything, as opposed to being dissatisfied with what I had...

So that was my route off the train. All three, I notice now I've written this, are about cleaning up and removing distortion, rather than about equipment choices per se. That distortion, for me, is what makes "hifi" fatiguing and gets in the way of the music.

Cheers
Pete

[1] For example, I had a copper SPDIF from a blu-ray player into the back of my DAC, so we could watch movies and put the sound through the stereo. Breaking that noise feed by swapping that copper co-ax for a bit of fibre with an E/O converter at each end worked wonders, and cost only a few quid from amazon. That sort of thing....