Maverick evolution
The unique attitude of founder Julian Vereker defined the early Naim Audio, but even he might be amazed by the company’s recent creations.
With Naim Audio today a respected member of the audio establishment, it’s easy to forget that in its early days the company was more the maverick, and founder Vereker a firebrand. Giving up his career as a racing driver, he’d tried a few entrepreneurial ventures but, despite successes including a sound-to-light box capable of switching 30kW of lighting for use in film production, these didn’t truly inspire him — until he began producing audio amplifiers. As with many company founders in these audio histories, he sold them initially to friends, then secured a contract to supply start-up station Capital Radio with active speakers, before taking the venture commercial in 1973, as Naim Audio.
In doing so, he took on some of the fundamental assumptions about audio systems at the time. Loudspeakers were considered the crucial element of the chain back then; amplifiers were far less important — nothing more than ‘lengths of wire with gain’.
Vereker refuted this with the NAP 200 power amplifier for home use in 1973, then two years later with the legendary NAP 250, the performance of which sent shock waves through the industry. The design provided the basic circuit topology for Naim power amplifiers up until the top-of-the-range NAP 500 a quarter of a century later.
Naim found its products, developed initially to satisfy the standards of the company’s music-loving engineers, were surpassing the commercial performance of its mainstream rivals. With a network of dedicated independent retailers now supporting the brand in the UK, Naim’s reputation grew through the 1970s, while its maverick attitude was enhanced in various ways — by a series of tongue-in-cheek press ads tapping the humour of its principal (above), but also through sticking to its ‘different’ ways, such as adherence to DIN connectors in preference to the RCA phono, which it held were technically inferior (and still does).
Paul Stephenson, who began with Naim as sales manager in 1981 and went on to become its Managing Director, remembers how the company was perhaps a little too led by those “music-loving engineers”.
“I wound up telling him that Naim was all about engineering,” says Stephenson of his first meeting with Vereker. “Nobody in the company knew anything about marketing products or how to talk to retailers. I said they were just arrogant engineers and the company would not grow without my help, fundamentally. He told me that he enjoyed being an arrogant engineer…”
But Vereker employed Stephenson, and the next decade saw major changes for the company. Naim’s first integrated amplifier, the NAIT, arrived in 1983, and its first loudspeaker, the three-box SBL, in 1985, at a time when the close synergy and working relationship between Naim and Ivor Tiefenbrun’s Linn was on the wane. Linn began selling its own amplification systems, and Vereker, with Stephenson, began taking Naim into new territories as well. Naim had produced an electronic crossover as early as 1977, and a speaker cable in 1981, but the SBL (Separated Box Loudspeaker) was a clear sign that Naim would now be presenting an increasingly independent front to the audio-buying public.
This included the setting up of its own representation in the United States — and beyond. Chris Murphy is the owner of N.A. Distributors, today the Naim distributors in both Australia and New Zealand. He was inspired to form the Wellington-based company in 1987 after hearing music played through a Naim system, and subsequently pursued the New Zealand distributorship.
“I first met Julian in Australia in 1987,” Chris remembers. “He was warm, friendly and interested, and we worked hard together in those early days of Naim New Zealand. I remember having my eyes widely opened by his gentle attention to detail, and he was always dedicated to the cause of showing people the power of music. That impish look over his glasses will never be forgotten.”
Completing the chain
Naim tuners were available as early as 1984 (the NAT 01), and the ARO tonearm appeared in 1989. Many Naim customers wanted a CD player, but Naim felt that the CD format initially had little to offer the serious music lover. By 1990, however, advances in digital technology allowed the company to produce its revolutionary CDS player, which came in two cases, but not as a separated transport and DAC — the second case housed a substantial power supply. Power supplies have always figured large as upgrade routes for Naim customers, allowing higher performance levels without fundamental changes to their systems.
The early years of the new millennium were an eventful time, Naim launching its stateof-the-art 500 Series products, beginning with the NAP 500 power amplifier and NAC 552 pre-amplifier, along with the CD555 CD player and 555PS power supply.
Later, as the move to file-based replay became clear, Naim finally released a separate DAC, one which claimed to add absolutely no jitter to the popular SPDIF interface and which had sufficient inputs to act as the hub in any contemporary digital system.
A new expertise
The DAC was joined by the Naim HDX hard-disk player, and subsequently by class-leading network streamers — a whole new area of expertise for Naim Audio. For a company that seemed so traditional, Naim embraced network streaming and file replay, including high-res audio, combining them with the ideas behind the more affordable Uniti products that began to appear in 2009, again radical in being mostly all-in-one designs.
The New Uniti range currently rolling out in 2017 is the culmination of this combination. Already released are the Core music server with CD ripper and internal storage able to deliver up to 12 independent streams of music to 32-bit/384kHz, and the Atom, a compact ‘just add speakers’ all-in-one music player with a host of inputs and streaming options. Two higher-level units, the Star and Nova, will follow. And three of the four new models incorporate the beautiful
and large top volume knob from Naim’s runaway success in recent years — the Mu-so wireless speakers. Eyebrows had been initially raised when Naim Audio announced a ‘wireless speaker’, but in fact the full-size Mu-so and half-size Mu-so Qb have introduced Naim’s unique attitude to thousands of new customers, while defining the benchmark for high-end all-in-one solutions, both in sonic performance and in its spectacular design. “Everyone loves Mu-so,” a Naim dealer told us recently. “It just sells itself.”
If Mu-so recommended Naim to a new level of consumer, the company certainly wasn’t abandoning true hi-fi. Not only was the main hi-fi range (pictured left — on Naim’s own ‘Fraim’ stand) still evolving, something very special was coming — the Statement reference amplification system (one of our Ultimate 30 this issue, see p30). The company’s own engineers were clearly excited.
“Paul Stephenson said to have no constraints— time, budget, size didn’t matter” Naim’s Electronic Design Director Steve Sells told us. “Only the performance counted. We wanted to push the boundaries and decided to work on radical departures, but there is also the balance of engineering and the honest approach to where budget is spent. While Statement had no budgetary constraints every part had to earn its place in the product.”
The Statement is almost as remarkable for its appearance as for the many micro innovations in its no-holds-barred design. Combining the NAC S1 preamplifier and two NAP S1 mono power amplifiers in its separate but unified design, it has become a show-stopper around the world’s hi-fi shows as well as the ultimate Naim product for high-end audio fans; each Statement power amplifier is rated at 746W into 8 ohms and weighs in at 101kg. It also plays well to the higher levels of speakers from the brand with which Naim merged in 2011, Focal. Today the two development teams, while still separated by the English Channel, cooperate to share respective centres of expertise.
From Mu-so to Statement, then, Naim Audio’s breadth of product has never been so wide, yet has never let go of that engineering prowess that Julian Vereker kept at the heart of the company, nor his view of what the company set out to achieve.
”We will always continue trying to capture that special feeling that only a performance can bring,” he said in his later years. “To me, music is a language, and musicians are reading the story a composer has written. I want our listeners to understand what the composer was trying to say and to hear it in a very natural and non-sterile way.”
With the release of the New Unitis, their technologies trickling down from the Statement and ease of use up from the Mu-sos, it seems there’ll be plenty more happy listeners to come.