CDS 3 CD player

It costs over £7000 with the required XPS power supply. And it might actually be worth it. We are listing the CDS 3 first because it can be justified with the upper reaches of the amplification from the previous page.

Gains over the CDX2 / XPS2 combo are both dramatic and subtle. One customer took less than 20 seconds to decide that it was sufficiently better to be worth the extra investment (the pianist struck a couple of keys, the soprano uttered something foreign and incomprehensible but it was all clearly more "correct").

It can turn your CD collection on its head, making the anticipated 'brilliant' track seem less amazing yet playing difficult recordings much better than expected. As good as the best record deck? Not on the best sounding LP's but it is a very high end source all the same. The CDS3 is a real long term listen. It gets better the better you know it and is extremely highly regarded into a wide variety of high end systems for a good reason.

NAC 252 preamplifier

Yes it's pricey (about £7500 with the required SuperCap) but the 252 can open recordings up in a spectacular way. You are certainly paying for resolution, scale, refinement, all the 'high end" things but the best part is the how it can convey interplays. During a recent demonstration playing some live Peter Gabriel recordings, it was the sense of two singers interacting that set off the goose bumps magic. You simply knew that they were smiling at one another!

High end audio can manage to tick off all the boxes yet remain resolutely dull. Thankfully the Naim pace rhythm and timing priority allows for music to remain uplifting and fun.

NAP 300 Power amplifier

The NAP 300 comes in two boxes. One for the power supply and the other for the amp itself. There are two, erm, robust burndy leads between the two boxes. One per channel. Amazingly, Naims use of a single XLR connect per channel means that conventional balanced leads can work from XLR equipped preamplifiers. we have had some good results with, dare I say it, a valve pre-amp from BAT (but a NAC 282 is better!).

And that leads us on nicely. The NAP 300 might be the obvious partner for the 252 / supercap but it is benign enough to smile sweetly with a NAC 282 in charge. In fact a NAC 282 with a SuperCap can make a lot of sense. Where the 250 can be a little hard to please, the NAP 300 seems to be very easy to match to loudspeakers. And it boasts a whopping 90 watts per channel, subjectively about 100% more than the NAP 250's 85 watts.

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