We could have not said it any better. This review of Naim's SuperUniti gives a very good description of what Naim is about:"Frankly, my initial time with the SuperUniti all but confirmed why I hadn’t gone down the Naim path years ago. Naim moves in a different musical direction to me: my triggers are stereo separation and detail (or so I thought), and Naim does tempo and leading edges. So I listened, boxed the SuperUniti up, and put my old system back together. And that was the point I began to realise why Naim has a loyal following.
My existing system, I concluded, sucks... and it sucks for all the reasons I supposedly like (liked?) hi‑fi.
It focused on the trivia, not the nub of the music, something the SuperUniti just pointed you towards. It didn’t change my musical core,
but it pulled me out of a musical rut, of only listening to the sound music makes, rather then the music itself. Given my affinity towards ‘gnarly’ 20th Century music, I would have expected the Naim’s sonic strengths to havelittle effect – a device that’s all about tempo is going to struggle to find much to latch on to in Panufnik or Varese, but in fact the SuperUniti’s sharp focus of musical energy – I can only describe it as ‘snap’ – really works to put difficult pieces from complicated composers into much-needed order. It’s odd, because the Naim sound is not a recreation of the live event as defined by the dictums of ‘The Absolute Sound’, but it has more of the intensity and fascination of the musical event, and it’s hard to go back to something less driven as a result. I fully recognise that this has none of the conventions of audio performance descriptions, but where they normally describe a product, they almost miss the point of the SuperUniti. If I analyse the sound in such terms, it comes across as dynamic, with a fundamentally neutral tonal balance and frequency response, with a pleasant, slightly light bounce to the bottom end, and a little bit of grain to the upper midrange and treble. Not enough to get upset about, but a little bit of extra character to the sound. Stereo imagery, though good, is not exceptional, especially in terms of image height, but it has excellent solidity. In such terms, the SuperUniti’s strongest suit is its vocal articulation, projecting a completely understandable voice into the room with scale and grace.
But this tells you everything about the sound, and nothing about how music sounds. The SuperUniti instead pushes these audiophile elements back in the mix, presenting the music uppermost....
The result of this is simple. I’m soon to be the proud owner of a Naim SuperUniti, and probably a UnitiServe, too. In fairness, irrespective of the other half’s intervention,
I’m happy to make the change. It has some kind of core effect on me as a listener that makes me think I’ve been listening ‘wrong’ all these years. With the SuperUniti, I’m back on the right heading, and I’m interested to see where that heading takes me: both musically, and in terms of audio equipment..."
We suggest, you guys read the entire article. It has a funny portion too
Here is the full review of Nicholas Ripley of HiFi+:
https://www.naimaudio.com/sites/default/files/HiFi_Plus_122_Naim_LR.pdfHappy Reading!
