Naim CD555 Upgrade
/Wednesday, 8 October 2008
For those of you fortunate enough to own the wonderful Naim CD555, you have every right to believe it to be the best CD player ever made, well, believe it or not but they have found away to significantly improve it.
Over the last few months Naim have had very good reason to be upbeat, what with all their new products such as the Superline, Powerline, HDX etc. but I can’t remember Jason from Naim being quite so excited as he was the other day when he broke the news to us, and that’s saying something!
Apparently Roy George, Naim’s head of design, had been trying a few things out and found that by using, not one but two NAPS555 power supplies for the CD555 made significant improvements.
Having two Burndy connections, one for the digital section and one for the analogue, installation is straight forward enough. Unlike the pre and power amplifiers, the CD555 doesn’t earth through its power supply but through the Hi-line interconnect via to the pre-amp so there are absolutely no earthing anomalies when configured this way. I understand Naim had tried this idea with both the 500 series pre and power but with multiple earths it actually made them sound worse.
Naturally we couldn’t wait to try this out and boy did Jason have every right to be so chipper. The resolution of the system appeared to take a leap forward bearing otherwise unheard textures coupled with greater image stability, focus and poise. Just as welcome was the total lack of any emphasis of the higher registers or harshness even on those awkward discs that you rarely play, we all have them don’t we? Far from muting the top end it actually seems to have increased the system’s bandwidth whilst rendering higher volume levels far easier on the ear, just what we all want, no?
Anyway, we could go on and on but space dictates and therefore we would strongly suggest a demo as soon as you can. This set-up is now on demo here at the Reading store.
