Board Pulling on 72

Posted by: Simon Jenkins on 31 August 2000

I have read in various places that you can get big sound improvements by pulling the unused boards on a 72. As I currently only use the phono, and soon cd, inputs is this worth doing?
What benefits should I expect to hear.

Also, would removing the boards invalidate my warranty ? The 72 is less than 6 months old,it was replaced earlier this year after a break-in, so there is still 18 months or so left to run. My last 72 ran fine for 5 years plus, so I'm not to concerned about it breaking down, but would be interested to know.

Cheers

Simon

Posted on: 31 August 2000 by Simon Jenkins

Thought perhaps my original post was a bit vague. I am not replacing my vinyl source with CD, the CD is in addition. So the removed boards would be the tuner and the two tape circuits.

Simon

Posted on: 31 August 2000 by Greg Beatty

Here is a complete 72 board rundown, copied from the old forum. The tape-out boards are the ones you will want to pull.

Here goes:-

325 Switching relay, Switch-on output delay

321 Main Gain, Output Drive times 2

324 Input Buffers and Tape output Buffers times 4. These output boards are one for left channel, one for right. You can't just use one of them when you record.

729 Time-aligned input buffer boards

322 MM Cartridge times 2

323 S / K MC cartridge boards times 2

326 Link Boards for connecting high level sources

328 As above, but with variable sensitivity option; also has high frequency filtering.

The spare four pins are for the Aux / CD input. You should plug your cd player here for best results. Try your cd through the Aux socket. If you get no sound, then you will need to get the 326 link boards. I think the tuner input is going to be almost identical in sound quality.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Paul Desmond
Naim Audio

Posted on: 13 September 2000 by Simon Jenkins

Finally got round to pulling the boards on my 72 last night. Was only able to remove the tape boards, but even this made a difference.

I found that the improvements were subtle, slightly tighter bass, improved clarity.

To compare, I found the improvement to probably be about half of what I got in going from some old QED79 strand speaker cable to NACA5.

Subtle changes, but definatly worth doing.

Simon