Racks

Hutter might go down ok

Whatever your wife approves is the best choice.

Glass shelves work well with Naim. Metal frame less so.

Have a look at Simrak Equipment Racks...

Quadraspire - they do lots of different shelf materials

Check out Isoblue, which is what I had before Fraim .................. I believe a few folks on here use it with good results ............... and it comes in oak, in both standard form, and a posh version.

uk hifi racks are relatively pretty and work fine with naim. Rogoz audio too.  Not very expensive ( less than fraimlite).  

Adam Zielinski posted:

Whatever your wife approves is the best choice.

Glass shelves work well with Naim. Metal frame less so.

Have a look at Simrak Equipment Racks...

I agree, if you are in England, book an appointment, and go to #Cymbiosis to listen to the Simrack! Plenty of different woods to choose from, you could even get a matching LP12 plinth?

French Rooster posted:

uk hifi racks are relatively pretty and work fine with naim. Rogoz audio too.  Not very expensive ( less than fraimlite).  

A fine Polish manufacturer. A bit pricy (recently) but still good value for money

I actually use another great Polish rack builder - Ostoja. He does most of the work as custom projects.

Using a Custom Design Milano Reference 10, 4 tier rack and very much like the look and properties of the 10mm glass shelves on wood spacers. I was using an Isoblue rack before trying this one and prefer the Custom Design. They offer a 6mm (Milan 6) and 10mm glass (Milan 10), glass finishes in clear or black and a handful of finishes and colours for the wood spacers. 

Recently upgraded from an original Quadraspire QAVM with the Bronze upgrade to a SVT2 in Bamboo also with the Bronze upgrade  the difference in quite staggering but also looks the part.

Adam Zielinski posted:

French Rooster posted:

uk hifi racks are relatively pretty and work fine with naim. Rogoz audio too.  Not very expensive ( less than fraimlite).  

A fine Polish manufacturer. A bit pricy (recently) but still good value for money

I actually use another great Polish rack builder - Ostoja. He does most of the work as custom projects.

i saw them via google:  they look like lovan racks with glass shelves. Nice look.

Bare Isoblue is very good for SQ and upgradable with tempered glass shelving under the gear. The trick is finding proper balls & nuts to support the glass.

Fraim. There’s no point accepting less. 

My wife said that she didn’t like the look of Fraim. To be honest I wasn’t hugely keen on its look. I bought Hutter and that with a quite happily for quite some time. 

But I continued to hanker after Fraim. After a while I found something that I really liked in terms of its look – mid-size levels throughout and buying it so that I could have different colours on the two baseboards - top one  natural ash and the lower one black to match the Fraim “legs”. 

It looks and sounds absolutely stunning. My wife thinks that it looks so much better than Hutter - which she very much liked initially. 

 I actually very very much regret not buying the Fraim sooner. School boy error. 

Isoblue here. Demo'ed against Quadraspire.

Works well and looks like furniture, not a bunch of tea-trays on sticks or lab equipment.

If I got hold of a huge wad of spondulix at any point however, the Fraim would be my first stop off for the splashing of the cash...

Everyone - many thanks some great replies and new options to look at that i had not considered before

Time to find some dealers and have a look.

Rob

dave marshall posted:

Check out Isoblue, which is what I had before Fraim .................. I believe a few folks on here use it with good results ............... and it comes in oak, in both standard form, and a posh version.

Dave

Out of interest how did you find the change to fraim ? big improvement in sound quality ?

Thanks

Rob

The Fraim is very good but fiddly and hard to clean. I’ve been using Quadradpire’s SVT in bamboo for over two years now and it’s excellent. It’s £280 per level, is easy to set up and looks nice. Isoblue is good, but really benefits from Fraim glass and balls, which start to make it a bit tecky looking. Hutter is good, but quite hard to get hold of. One downside it that the necessary hifi base is really close to the floor, leaving little space for wires, should that be important. I tried a Hifi Racks stand once and the build quality was poor, and it made the system sound slow and heavy. I’m not convinced that solid oak is good for the sound of Naim. 

I would love Fraim but it’s expensive.  Quadraspire does the job - entirely fit for purpose.   Problem solved when Statement is shortly updated with source integrated into S1

I'm very happy with Hifi Racks. My multi-tier rack was well built, looks very nice, and the NDX and olives seem to sound good on it.

As a self confessed frame agnostic, I would be interested in how the 'frame faithful' conduct their testing. Short of a very committed dealer setting up two lots of identical kit side by side on two seperate frames I can think of no other way of true A/B testing. To do this outside the demo room in the living space of a prospective purchaser becomes a truly mammoth task. 

I suspect this rarely, if ever, happens. I imagine the majority of the perceived benefits are based upon memory of how the kit used to sound. The more cynical would then introduce the cost reinforcement theory, the whole upgrade becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. 

I have very little experience in this field. My kit now resides back on built in shelving rather than the Isoblue on which it was initially tested, and I truly cannot tell the difference. I read threads such as this with a modicum of incredulity, but perhaps I need to have another try?

Mort2k posted:

dave marshall posted:

Check out Isoblue, which is what I had before Fraim .................. I believe a few folks on here use it with good results ............... and it comes in oak, in both standard form, and a posh version.

Dave

Out of interest how did you find the change to fraim ? big improvement in sound quality ?

Thanks

Rob

 

Hi Rob,

The Fraim replaced Isoblue at the point where I was seriously upgrading the black boxes, and I simply took the advice of folks on here that the new system would sound so much better on Fraim.

I got a good deal on the Fraim, so simply went with it as an act of faith, which means that, with the change of kit, I never ever did a direct comparison.

It's remained through several upgrades over the years, and I've never regretted the not insignificant outlay.

I had no complaints with my entry level kit on Isoblue, and the decision to change it was also partly down aesthetics, which, of course, is  a personal choice.  My Fraim is black legs / black shelves (surely the only combination worth considering?) 

Timmo1341 posted:

As a self confessed frame agnostic, I would be interested in how the 'frame faithful' conduct their testing. Short of a very committed dealer setting up two lots of identical kit side by side on two seperate frames I can think of no other way of true A/B testing. To do this outside the demo room in the living space of a prospective purchaser becomes a truly mammoth task. 

I suspect this rarely, if ever, happens. I imagine the majority of the perceived benefits are based upon memory of how the kit used to sound. The more cynical would then introduce the cost reinforcement theory, the whole upgrade becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. 

I have very little experience in this field. My kit now resides back on built in shelving rather than the Isoblue on which it was initially tested, and I truly cannot tell the difference. I read threads such as this with a modicum of incredulity, but perhaps I need to have another try?

Before buying a Fraim, many years ago, I was using a Quadraspire Reference - the one that looks like oblong loo seats. I had a CDS3 sitting on top at the time. I borrowed a set of Fraim and set it up in front of the existing rack. Then I moved the CDS3 from one to the other, without turning everything off. Goodness knows how the wires stretched, but they did. The Fraim was significantly better. In hindsight the Reference wasn’t much good, and the SVT is much better. 

With kit at a decent level, the rack can make a really big difference, opening up the sound and letting the music flow. With my 272 the upgraded top shelf also makes an easily audible difference. What I look for it whether the music sounds natural and engaging and it’s easy to hear what the racks are doing. If people focus on different things it may be harder, I don’t know. 

dave marshall posted:

Mort2k posted:

dave marshall posted:

Check out Isoblue, which is what I had before Fraim .................. I believe a few folks on here use it with good results ............... and it comes in oak, in both standard form, and a posh version.

Dave

Out of interest how did you find the change to fraim ? big improvement in sound quality ?

Thanks

Rob

 

Hi Rob,

The Fraim replaced Isoblue at the point where I was seriously upgrading the black boxes, and I simply took the advice of folks on here that the new system would sound so much better on Fraim.

I got a good deal on the Fraim, so simply went with it as an act of faith, which means that, with the change of kit, I never ever did a direct comparison.

It's remained through several upgrades over the years, and I've never regretted the not insignificant outlay.

I had no complaints with my entry level kit on Isoblue, and the decision to change it was also partly down aesthetics, which, of course, is  a personal choice.  My Fraim is black legs / black shelves (surely the only combination worth considering?) 

Dave

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Rob

Hungryhalibut posted:

The Fraim is very good but fiddly and hard to clean. I’ve been using Quadradpire’s SVT in bamboo for over two years now and it’s excellent. It’s £280 per level, is easy to set up and looks nice. Isoblue is good, but really benefits from Fraim glass and balls, which start to make it a bit tecky looking. Hutter is good, but quite hard to get hold of. One downside it that the necessary hifi base is really close to the floor, leaving little space for wires, should that be important. I tried a Hifi Racks stand once and the build quality was poor, and it made the system sound slow and heavy. I’m not convinced that solid oak is good for the sound of Naim. 

Thanks for the info and your further response below, interesting about the HiFi Racks experience 

Hungryhalibut posted:  

 

The Fraim was significantly better.....

With kit at a decent level, the rack can make a really big difference, opening up the sound and letting the music flow. With my 272 the upgraded top shelf also makes an easily audible difference. What I look for it whether the music sounds natural and engaging and it’s easy to hear what the racks are doing. If people focus on different things it may be harder, I don’t know. 

Now you've made a move back up the Naim ladder, how long before the Quadradpire makes way for Fraim?! Are you back on the upgrade treadmill - I have a suspicious feeling this hifi lark is akin to alcoholism. Once you left the 'wagon' of the SuperUniti, this slow, but inexorable climb back up the ladder became inevitable. My theory is that, for many, serious hifi ownership bears a frightening resemblance to economic 'boom or bust'. It is seemingly impossible to resist taking that next step, no matter how loudly we may protest our obsession is cured!

Me? I'm just waiting for the 372, or whatever moniker is given to the next Naim streamer sans power supply!!

Rob, Isoblue, available in oak.

Chris