Neill's DVD5 and the Showcase

Hi there,

Well I had a most enjoyable time on Sunday afternoon, making a pleasant trip up to Stirling
to listen to Neill Ferguson's AV system.

The system consists of a Panasonic 37 inch Plasma, sitting on top of a nice Quadraspire
rack in wood and a single sheet of plain glass. The glass gives the shelves a nice
open look, making the table look smaller than it actiually is. I must say I think I like
the size of the 37 inch plasma he has over my smaller 32 inch LCD.

This is fed by a nice set of components:

Naim AV2
Naim DVD5

Bryston 9B SST 5 channel power amp

driving a set of Snell fronts and center, with some in wall mounted rears.

This is all connected together with a nice selection of Chord cabling. Fortunately,
not having Naim power amps has meant that Neil hasn't had the pleasure of trying to
route NACA5 around his room ;-)

We watched Serenity and Star Wars III which both looked and sounded lovely on the
system. The picture being very nice via the Chord HDMI cable. We then had a listen
to Jack Johnston on CD which was nice.

Now, for the controversial section of my post :-)

We then substitited the Naim DVD5 with a Krell Showcase DVD player.

We began by playing the Jack Johnston CD in the player again. What a difference, the
soundstage opened up, you could hear the stumming of the guitar strings and
him slapping the guitar body which wasn't clear on the DVD5. And, for me most gutting
of all, it had PRAT. It galls me to say this, but the Krell had better PRAT and pace
than the DVD5. I must say I was very surprised and shocked at the improvement in CD
quality on this player. I had been expecting to hear a bit of a difference, as there
is a substantial difference in price between these two players, £2350 for the DVD5 and
nearer £4600 for the Krell, but I was shocked at how much of an improvement in CD
playback there was.

Now for DVD playback. The Krell has a scaler built in to it already. So, the price
for the Krell above includes the scaler cost. If you were to add in roughly £1000
odd for the supposed Naim scaler, then the Naim now comes out at £3350. The picture
with the scaler in the Krell was noticeably better, but it was not a massive improvement
for me. I think I would say there is something in it between the two players on DVD
playback, but not a massive difference. CD playback is an altogether different matter.

One thing that we found a problem was that the AV2 and Krell seem to use the same IR signals, so Ffwd the Krell would Mute the AV2 at the same time ?

I would love for Naim to try the Krell out and then have the ability to match and
exceed it's capabilities in their next generation equipment.

I'll try an attach a couple of pictures of both machines below. Oops, can't work how to do this.

Cheers,
Roy.