500 is back!
Posted by: David O'Higgins on 01 September 2017
I have 37,000 new tracks. Wesley from AudioSpace in Belfast delivered and installed my DR'd and serviced 500. He had kindly loaned me a 250 DR to tide me over, and it is indeed very good. But the 500 is something else entirely, and it is still cold. If my memory serves (a big if!), it will keep getting better for months. With retirement beckoning in a year, I may even manage to make real inroads into those 37,000 tracks, some probably for the first time. Where to start.......?
Richieroo posted:The 500 is quite a different beast - it does not rely on the negative rail being at gnd - earth, you also have a huge psu - I was amazed as I said before I did a direct substitution with 250dr - hooked up to a 272 / 555ps combo - and it made a very big difference - I was impressed how good the 272 actually was..... I will also add the 500 in question was elderly it was around 12 years young.... and it blew the 250dr away.
I think the DR amps are slightly differently tuned than the older generation, which may account for some of the difference you hear
When I compared 250.2 with 500, the main difference I found was in the Bass.
Anyway 500 is a very mighty amplifier, no doubt, and yes I know it doesn't send the return speaker currents back into the negative terminal which affects the signal earth 0 V which basically means it doesn't add distortion back into the system.
In the same way 552 has a unique PSU, very different from every Naim preamp below that, so 552/500 is a very mighty amplifier.
But you have to pay lots of money for that 