Cables more hype than value?

I bought the 5i because I was looking to put together a small system for a house I rented in CO for a year. I was curious to see how good an integrated in this price range would sound, given some of the positive comments I was hearing. If you don't have a lot of experience with passives, the main reason people use them is because its very difficult to get a good sounding active line stage for a low price. Many people feel that is you can't get a good active preamp, use a passive or a source with a volume control instead. Needless to say, I'm one of those people. I should also mention that I'm very sensitive to high frequencies, so some of the things that bothered me about the 5i, may not bother you.

The best way that I can describe the overall sound of the Naim is that its not clean sounding. (There was nothing wrong with it. I was able put it next to another one in a store and the sound was identical.) When I first tried it with a pair of B&W LM-1's I had on my PC, the Naim sounded fine. But the B&W was a fairly dull sounding speaker with not too much detail. I needed a real pair of speakers, so I went out and bought a pair of Vandersteen 1's. When I put the Naim on those, it just fell apart. It's true that the Vandersteen is much more detailed and resolving, but its easy to drive and I don't think it was unfair to the Naim to pair it with that speaker. Naim said either the 1's or 2's would be OK.

What let me to believe that the Naim had a passive line stage, was the high frequencies. They weren't refined at all, as well as an overall harshness. It just sounded like a typical, cheap active line stage. I also had 2 other amps I bought to try; a Creek 5350SE and a Musical Fidelity A3.5. The MF was a bit cleaner sounding overall, and had a lot more power, but the highs sounded, more or less, like the Naim. The line stage in the MF I know is definitely active. The real test was when I put it next to the Creek. The 5350 does have a passive LS. When I put that in the system, there was an immediate difference. The highs were completely relaxed, but had more detail. There was no question that I was listening to a much better quality active preamp, or a passive. The difference was not at all subtle.

I should also point out, prior to my time with the Naim, I had quite a bit of experience using passives, so the Naim wasn't really a learning experience for me. I kind of know what to expect when I hear both designs. Not only that, don't read too much into what I'm saying here. You have the Naim and are getting excellent results. That's all that matters. It wasn't the right amp for me, but it definitely is the right amp for you. Don't let me, or anyone else, talk you out of enjoying your system.

Zd - thanks for that feedback. I think it just goes to show that one amp in different environments can sound very different.

However - I am the first to admit that the NAIM can be very finicky - they seem to work well with their own components/speakers, but when mated with components from other brands they can get more than a little "quirky".

Early on I spent some time "adapting" my components to the NAIM. It's design requires that all sources be properly grounded at their mains lead - so my Cambridge Audio phono stage with its Wal-wart power supply and the Pioneer Elite DVD player with two pin plug presented some challenges to get the best sound out of them - grounding each chassis to a central point seemed to fix many of the problems.

My more recent components, all having a grounded power supplies, seem to be a much better match.

Add to that the many different cables I have tried, i.e. IC's SC's and PC's are crucial to get it to its current level of performance.

So I am not at all surprised at what you experienced.

But once you get it all figured out they can sound very sweet indeed.

One other thing I know is an issue with NAIM is high capacitance speaker cables - they can cause the amp to throw a "wobbler".

Having said that - I found these details on the NAIM web site

NACA5 specifications are as follows:

Capacitance: 16pF per metre
Resistance: 9 milliohms per metre
Inductance: 1uH per metre

Minimum length: 3.5 metres per channel
Maximum length: 20 metres per channel
25 meters can be tolerated

lets take a range of cable length 3.5-20 meters

NAIM amps amp can easily accommodate values in the range of...

Capacitance: 56pF to 320pf per cable
Resistance: 31.5 milliohms to 180 milliohms per cable
Inductance: 3.5uH to 20 uH per cable

In my current listening space my cables are in the 3.5 metre range

- so this affords me fair degree of latitude in that...

- I can actually use cables up to "91pF per metre" without and issue

But the 16pf/meter, which is a bit of a "red herring", seems to be what most people latch on to.

But I did find that Kimber Speaker cables did not perform very well - compared to Van den Hul

Moving on....

From the link I posted it seems that different people have widely varying success with passive and active line stages

I think your observation about good active line stages being expensive, may also apply to good passive line stages also, since sound quality seems to depend on how it is implemented e.g. transformers vs stepped volume controls etc...

It also seems that a good passive line stage can be as expensive as a good active line stage.

One thing for sure - I'm a little wiser now :-)

Many thanks for taking the time to post - it was very enlightening

OK. I read all 13 pages of this thread and there's no consensus as to whether or not cables are more hype than value. So, let me approach this subject from a slightly different perspective. If my current connections are all "stock" wire that came with my components, except for my speaker wire which is minimum length(about 8 feet) 12 gauge copper speaker wire from radio shack terminated with monoprice banana plugs that I installed myself, which connection do you pro-aftermarket cable proponents think is most critical to improved sound quality? Is it the optical cable which gets the digital signal from my music server to my DAC? Or is it the speaker wire? Or is it the wire that provides the power from the wall socket to my amplifier? I have spent many hours improving room acoustics and experimenting with speaker and sub placement and am inclined to believe that these simple steps will do more for (or to) sound quality than any change in wires. Which wire is most important?

Danaroo, as with the original question posed in the thread I doubt that a consensus can be reached concerning your question. One reason for that, IMO, being that the answer will be dependent on the designs of the specific components that are involved, and in ways that don't have much if any predictability. The answer is also likely to often be dependent on the lengths of the various cables in the system.

See my post here for discussion of some of those dependencies.

My post here, earlier in this thread, may also be of interest.

Without knowing anything about your system beyond what is stated in your post above, though, my guess is that what may make the biggest difference would likely be changing the optical cable you mentioned to a coaxial S/PDIF or AES/EBU cable (depending on what your DAC can accept). With the odds being in favor of that difference being for the better, although not necessarily.

Regards,
-- Al

P.S: Apologies for the misspelling of your screen name.

Regards,
-- Al