Help Crakling sound from my Celestion A1 and Nait II

Posted by: JYOW on 03 April 2002

I have been using my Nait II for a long time with different kinds of cables, but never used the NACA5 cables as advised, but never ran into peoblemm yet.

2 months ago after buying a pair of Celestion A1, I plugged it in with a new pair of half decent OFC cable and the left channel started giving out crackling sound like the tweeter is broken. After fiddling with it for a while the noise went away and the system sound OK for a few months.

Posted on: 03 April 2002 by seagull

is your NAIT II and when was it last serviced?

Posted on: 04 April 2002 by JYOW

This amp is about 10 years old, and has never been serviced.

The fully thing is the amp seems to be OK, the noise depends ohn how the cable is connected.

Posted on: 04 April 2002 by JYOW

I found what the problem is, the contact between the banana plug and the Naim output is flaky. I had to adjust the stiffness of my banana plug and everything is crystal clear.

Which brings me to one worry, if the output receptacles become loose, what am I to do?

Posted on: 04 April 2002 by Eddie Pugh

If you must use banana plugs I strongly recommend the Audioquest ones. They are expensive but have an inbuilt spring effect as they are gold plated partial sprung cylinders of metal

Of course Naim recommend their own proprietary two pin plug job.

I had similar problems to yours with a Quad 606 recently which came to a head when I changed the speaker cable to some spare NAC A5 The output terminal which was plastic just sheared straight off due to the cable's stiffness as I pushed the amp back into position on the shelf
I replaced the terminals with some meatier ones from Farnell Now sounds fine and good for another 10 years

OK its only in the study on the computer afterall