ND555 Impressions

My system was unplugged for two weeks over Christmas, back on again last Sunday. On Friday morning I played the Bert Jansch track The Black Swan before heading off to work and superb it sounded too, when I came home I thought I’d see how Tidal compared so found the same track on Tidal and it sounded a bit muddled, nothing overt but it just wasn’t jelling as well, I was all set to conclude that I’d still have to buy CDs but I went back to the copy on my Core and it too sounded more muddled than it had in the morning. So a few possibilities:

A day at a job I no longer enjoy left me less receptive to the music, just when I needed it.

The 555 or the rest of the system was still settling from being turned off.

The 555 is still throwing the odd wobble after 4 months.

5.30 pm sees a lot more noise on the mains than 8am.

I’m still buying CDs though.

yeti42 posted:

My system was unplugged for two weeks over Christmas, back on again last Sunday. On Friday morning I played the Bert Jansch track The Black Swan before heading off to work and superb it sounded too, when I came home I thought I’d see how Tidal compared so found the same track on Tidal and it sounded a bit muddled, nothing overt but it just wasn’t jelling as well, I was all set to conclude that I’d still have to buy CDs but I went back to the copy on my Core and it too sounded more muddled than it had in the morning. So a few possibilities:

A day at a job I no longer enjoy left me less receptive to the music, just when I needed it.

The 555 or the rest of the system was still settling from being turned off.

The 555 is still throwing the odd wobble after 4 months.

5.30 pm sees a lot more noise on the mains than 8am.

I’m still buying CDs though.

 

I think you gave the potential reasons yourself. The 4 months doesn’t say so much, it’s more about total run time. I did push it much further during this holiday with night play etc, and now have the feeling it is fully stabilized. Before I only listened, and never pushed the burn in. 

A factor which should also not be ignored is the quality of the electricity signal .....

and of course your own perceptiveness to what you hear...

I would always recommend to play local stored music from a quality perspective. Tidal is good, but not as good as local.

I'm glad others are noting ups and downs in SQ as I have after installing ND555 and a 552 replacing my 272/555PS about 5 weeks ago. There are times when I'm thinking that its not as good as the 272/555 on certain albums/tracks (all local streaming). Generally would experience too forward almost irritating sound. I have moved the Sopra-3 10 more inches into the room, now almost 5 feet from front wall measured from driver fronts and now almost no toe-in. The room is 25 feet long and 18 feet wide.But I wonder whether its all the "burn in" process and I should stop tweaking. I also think cable dressing may need a little work. Nap 300 Burndys on the carpet, bottom of the brains and braun stacks,and lots of power cords around.

Anyway I am somewhat reassured for now.

jsaudio posted:

I'm glad others are noting ups and downs in SQ as I have after installing ND555 and a 552 replacing my 272/555PS about 5 weeks ago. There are times when I'm thinking that its not as good as the 272/555 on certain albums/tracks (all local streaming). Generally would experience too forward almost irritating sound. I have moved the Sopra-3 10 more inches into the room, now almost 5 feet from front wall measured from driver fronts and now almost no toe-in. The room is 25 feet long and 18 feet wide.But I wonder whether its all the "burn in" process and I should stop tweaking. I also think cable dressing may need a little work. Nap 300 Burndys on the carpet, bottom of the brains and braun stacks,and lots of power cords around.

Anyway I am somewhat reassured for now.

Me too. The 272 really is that good.

G

How many hours have you clocked up on the ND,And is the 552 new?.if they are both new l think you have got a bit more time to go for run in.lve clocked up 600 hours on my ND and it still has its ups & downs.

jsaudio posted:

I'm glad others are noting ups and downs in SQ as I have after installing ND555 and a 552 replacing my 272/555PS about 5 weeks ago. There are times when I'm thinking that its not as good as the 272/555 on certain albums/tracks (all local streaming). Generally would experience too forward almost irritating sound. I have moved the Sopra-3 10 more inches into the room, now almost 5 feet from front wall measured from driver fronts and now almost no toe-in. The room is 25 feet long and 18 feet wide.But I wonder whether its all the "burn in" process and I should stop tweaking. I also think cable dressing may need a little work. Nap 300 Burndys on the carpet, bottom of the brains and braun stacks,and lots of power cords around.

Anyway I am somewhat reassured for now.

I wanted to take sets of SL and others with my nd555, dealer wisely said enjoy the journey, the cables will be a new one to enjoy. My nd555 had to be replaced after 2 months, the new one sounds great, but the previous one had bloomed and was lovely.....but I had not realised, it had grown on me.

Yes Graemeh your system is, what I believe, right at the edge of where the law of diminishing begins to weigh in. But many in this hobby succumb to wanting that bit more. Enjoy.

Why did it have to go back?.

Bob, dropped a channel on din output settings, rca setting was still O.K. I was fortunate that my dealer had one in stock and Naim collected my faulty unit in the afternoon. Probably a faulty relay.

Bob the 552 was new as well. I have probably clocked 100 hours at most

jsaudio posted:

Bob the 552 was new as well. I have probably clocked 100 hours at most

At 100 hours you have a long way to go for full burn in. Enjoy it. The end result will be worth it. 

My ND555 is still opening-out after 4 months and getting better. This does not surprise me at all as all my Naim boxes and cables did this and the more my system capability has improved the more I hear these differences that may otherwise be somewhat more masked.

The worst run-in is in the past and it is now gradual but significant improvements in resolution. For example, a week or so ago the sound began to include more low-level detail but at first in a muddled-way and could sound a bit murky - but I could hear there was more there just not resolved fully. Now it is resolved and clear in detail - and so-on it seems to go over time. I get an at-first extra-extended slightly uncontrolled murky deep-bass, then over a couple of weeks it becomes clearly-defined and solid.

At some stages in the run-in and opening-out of the ND555 I would want things to hide these effects, but they pass and I'm finding the ND555 a very revealing source in a very musical way. There is a nice solid warmth of harmonic-structures to the rendition and great phase linearity in the bass which gives a solid clean presentation of low-bass with good power. Meaning the bass-timing is rather good right now.

Expect up and down run-in at first then a gradual opening-out over the first few months. Don't jump-in with trying other cables and tweaks unless it really sounded wrong from the start as at times I wanted less bass until it properly resolved itself and became tuneful.

DB.

My ND555 is also up and down but after 300 hr. It just keeps getting better. Only problem is screen freezes often. Hopefully Naim gets the update firmware soon

J

Thanks for all the comments. Its reassuring.

Hi JS-

When you have time for it, and your enthusiasm is at a high ebb, really going to town on super careful system set up is much more important with 500 series components than even Naim's best selling middle of the line products.    

Both speaker placement and cable dressing are important, as you have mentioned.     There are other layers to this as well such as what your equipment is placed on, and how well sorted out that environment is.    Finally, room acoustics are often the trickiest to address in many well furnished homes, but as the equipment pushes closer to being able to capture the elusive cues which signal actual musicians playing in your room, the more these sorts of things come to matter.

As others have noted, enjoy the ride.

Good listening,

Bruce

When my ND555 was installed my dealer completely stripped down my system ,cleaned everything ie glass, wire ring, all the naim friam rerun all the cabling,altered all the box placement,it looked better and sounded wonderfull,l didn’t expect this attention to detail,thankyou Tom Tom.

bdnyc posted:

Hi JS-

When you have time for it, and your enthusiasm is at a high ebb, really going to town on super careful system set up is much more important with 500 series components than even Naim's best selling middle of the line products.    

Both speaker placement and cable dressing are important, as you have mentioned.     There are other layers to this as well such as what your equipment is placed on, and how well sorted out that environment is.    Finally, room acoustics are often the trickiest to address in many well furnished homes, but as the equipment pushes closer to being able to capture the elusive cues which signal actual musicians playing in your room, the more these sorts of things come to matter.

As others have noted, enjoy the ride.

Good listening,

Bruce

 

 

To add to that I wouldn’t be amazed that people need to make additional adaptations in room correction or speaker positioning after they replace a lesser source with a ND555.

If you have not stripped-down and rebuilt your Fraim for three years or more then it is well worthwhile more than you may think. Re-do all the tightening to just tight enough and if anything is so tight you can't easy undo it then it was too tight and will 'shout'.  Generally I find Fraim build are a combination of far too loose (can turn by hand) or so tight you have to strain to undo them. They should all be the same and tighten with the supplied spanner and then a bit more but not tighter than that.

Depending on how big your system is it is a chore but if you only do it every three years then not so bad and well worth the effort. Others have heard what it did to my system sense of musical cohesion - by comparison it sounded like everything was slightly out of tune before then it all got brought into focus and timing far improved.

DB.

Darke Bear,

I think that a system rebuild of this type should be something which a Naim dealer has to offer, and the for which the customer should have to pay, quite apart from the purchase of components?

David

On the subject of cable dressing, what are the guildlines?  Cables off the floor, excess speaker cables in the “Naim Z” wrap, power cables away from signal wires, brain stack/brawn stack, when necessary power and signal not parallel, source on top, extra sheles/ tall shelves fot sources, what else for the setup?  

As to getting the Dealer to rebuild - I know it happens so talk to them as it is always better to watch someone else do it all that knows what they are doing if you don't want to dive-in yourself.

Cables - all you say but also keep the Ethernet or other digital cable from touching the analogue output if possible and certainly not running together. If the interconnect from the ND555 to the Pre (mine is SL) has to touch anything then the wood part of the Fraim is least-bad I find - avoid it touching the metal uprights.

It is tough to get a 'perfect' install but just achieve as much as you can and some things seem to be worth the effort to clear more to extract the best results. Place the ND555 in center of glass shelf on Fraim but near the front-edge of the glass and ensure the glass shelf itself is level with the front of the stack and centered - it is easy for it to get pulled to one side a bit and worth getting it all lined-up to sound best.

DB.

Michael_B. posted:

BPhotographer posted:

Great Michael. The ND555 is excellent but the presentation is different to what we all used to have with the CD players.

Which Ethernet cables and switch are you using?

BP. 

The Switch is the much-recommended Netgear Prosafe GS105. We were using teh cables that came with it, but will be getting high quality digital (but not audiophile) cables for the ND555 when it arrives.

FWIW I’ve now procured a Cisco Refresh programme manufacturer-refurbished "as new" Catalyst switch to compare with it during the install.

Bob green posted:

When my ND555 was installed my dealer completely stripped down my system ,cleaned everything ie glass, wire ring, all the naim friam rerun all the cabling,altered all the box placement,it looked better and sounded wonderfull,l didn’t expect this attention to detail,thankyou Tom Tom.

That sounds like exceptional and unusually good service, Bob. I'm sure that will have helped you get the most out of the system. I usually have to redo the installation to meet my own expectations.

Many of the better dealers see this as part of the job upon install, to ensure their customers get the most out of the equipment they have purchased from them.

When I had my ND55 installed along with 252/supercap, Andy from Signals took my Fraim apart and rebuilt. I had originally assembled myself and as DB mentioned so much better to watch an expert. For me the increase in cabling, particularly burndies would have been daunting, along with the correct positioning of brains and brawn to get the right cable “hang”. A great dealer it would appear judging by some posts on the forum is not as easy to find as one would hope.