Recent price jump in new Uniti product range

Posted by: David N on 02 February 2018

Have been patiently waiting for Star and Nova to come to the part of the world I am located - Melbourne Australia. Been waiting for close to a year for them. Atom was available third quarter last year and I was so excited about that. Been listening to that along with pre-release model of Nova at local stores. Would be willing to sink money into a Nova if it was available. While I love Atom, just a beautiful unit, it lacked DAB+, not that it is a show-stopper or anything like that. Nova only has screen on one side looking like it is two units joined together. For the price tag, Nova might as well have a screen covering the whole front face of the unit so long it can be turned off. Won't you love that? But sonically Nova does better presentation, is more articulate and is more convincing. It is louder but I don't need it very loud. SQ has to be higher priority to look as much as I love Atom's looks.

Stores told me to wait until late Jan saying Nova may be here then. So I waited and came back to check a week ago, only to be disappointed that Nova is still not here (it is Feb now) and both Atom and Nova's prices have jumped again, this time by a significant margin. Atom used to be $3000 and $3150 depending whether you add HDMI module or not. Frankly I don't know why anyone wanting an all-in-one unit would leave out HDMI. Now Atom is $3750 and $4000. That's just shy of 27% jump. Nova is now $7900 and shot pass the $8000 mark at $8150 depending if you want DAB+ or not.

I am not saying it is not worth the money, I am just very disappointed about these jumps and it is hard to justify this purchase decision now. Perhaps I should have taken the advice of stores and bought the older models instead. After all, they were and probably still are discounted because of the new range. I don't know if fellow Naim supporters feel the same. No disrespect intended to Naim, I love the fact that development remains in UK and hope this continues. I love the quality you put into your products. Because of this long delay, I have used other means for streaming and make my system wireless. Only capabilities I haven't enabled yet is HDML ARC and integrating DAB+ into the system. Loving it so far. I use Spotify, not Tidal. Will focus my energy on better music sources than machine at least for the time being.

Have a good day everyone. Listen to the music, not the machine.

Posted on: 04 February 2018 by Claus-Thoegersen

there is of course no UK magic in Naim! Otherwise foreigners would not buy Naim gear! But unfortunately I suspect my QB will explode shortly now it is close to 2 years old, and build in China.

Claus

Posted on: 04 February 2018 by David N

@Clays, I have nothing against Chinese made products. Everything are made for a price. Components such as capacitors are spec’ed to how long it is to last for. I have a Samsung LED TV that is over 5 years old and died twice in that time because of power board failure. This problem is widely reported - under spec’ed caps that pop and die. There was a class action in the states against Samsung. That I have a problem with. If there’s anything I have against off-shoring manufacturing is the lost of local jobs opportunities and impact it has on families..

Posted on: 04 February 2018 by audio1946

David N posted:
@Clays, I have nothing against Chinese made products. Everything are made for a price. Components such as capacitors are spec’ed to how long it is to last for. I have a Samsung LED TV that is over 5 years old and died twice in that time because of power board failure. This problem is widely reported - under spec’ed caps that pop and die. There was a class action in the states against Samsung. That I have a problem with. If there’s anything I have against off-shoring manufacturing is the lost of local jobs opportunities and impact it has on families..

the lack of manufacturing in the uk was done by the government in the 80s ,killing it off . with regard to quality ive seen the quality of manufacturing/construction of the quad 2912 speaker and it is top class . . how many audio manufacturers have we have in the uk . naim,cyrus sugden.chord and a few speaker ones too. very sad .