What have we here a new Naim speaker, a smaller version of the Ovator S-600 at a more affordable price, for Naim at least, but alas not me, priced at a fiver under 3K.

Cheapskate!

So where did you see this new speaker?

I saw them get a mention on the WHF forum.

Well, I know there are prototypes doing the rounds among dealers for feedback, so I'm guessing they're still quite a while away from production.

...oops, forgot they were announced yesterday...

I have yet to hear them, but don't Naim speakers have a reputation of letting the side down a bit?

Many many people don't get on with traditional Naim speakers. I used to be one of them, but over the years I've changed to really like them.

The Ovators are a genuine attempt by Naim to give customers what they want with a bit more warmth and scale while trying not to lose the Naim speaker hallmarks of speed and timing.

Do you still need to shove the speakers hard right up against the wall?

Doesn't this set up and posistioning cause a loss of depth to the sound?

No, the new ovator range is designed for free-standing positioning away from room boundaries.

Traditional Naim speakers needed to be up against the wall and although this does flatten the image it doesn't give you less depth of sound....and in a couple of cases I've heard amazing imagery coming from wall-bound speakers.

Frank, what are these Ovator S 600 are expected to sell for?

Lovely looking speakers!

I wonder if the naimes with a lot of cash to spend will go for these or the hot competition from Neat, Kudos, there are some fine designs around those kind of prices. I suppose by just having the naim logo on them helps.

The S-600s are £6000 a pair. The S-400s are £3000/pair. Physically S-600s are actually bigger than most speakers in the price range which means you perceive that you get a lot of speaker for your money. The cabinets are also quite complex. The main carcass is set on a leaf sprung suspension in the die-cast base or plinth which also houses the crossover. The main cabinet uses a combination of 25mm and 50mm panels and the individual bass drivers have their own chambers in the cabinet which aids the bracing as well as keeps the interaction down to a minimum. The top driver is an unusual one in that it's a BMR unit designed over 3 years in consultation with Karl Heinz Fink and alleged to have decent output to 35khz while maintaining high dispersion (the really unexpected thing in my view, since beaming is always an issue with treble units). This BMR driver sits in its own heavy aluminium tube enclosure which is held in place by two leaf-springs, one at each end, coupled to the baffle and rear of the speaker. This arrangement is meant to decouple the BMR from the speaker above 4hz.

The S-400 follows the same design principles but obviously the BMR enclosure isn't as massive (the speaker isn't as deep for starters!). It also uses completely different components - a smaller BMR, smaller bass units too.

This decoupling technology is unusual in most speakers, but in Naim's history this is pretty much what they've always been about - the SBL is the Separate Box Loudspeaker, and it separated the bass/mid driver from the trebele unit by having a completely separate enclosure for the latter which was pinned to the base of the complete speaker with a couple of long arms. The mid/bass driver sat in a small enclosure which had a PAR (Passive Acoustic Resistance) filter in its base. The small mid enclosure sat on upward facing spikes which were actually part of a built-in stand in the lower bass enclosure. The mid enclosure was coupled to the larger base enclosure by a glued gasket. The PAR filter allowed through only bass frequencies and did not allow through anything above that. This way the dirve unit saw a small sealed enclosure for midrange frequencies but a much larger enclosure for bass frequencies. The idea was to optimize the response of the driver depending on the frequencies it reproduced.

Each PAR was made by hand individually with a bunch of straw like rods. It couldn't be volume productionized apparently, and so SBLs cost a fortune to make. The SL-2 is a refinement of the SBL. The individual treble unit remains but the gasket has gone to be replaced by a stupidly high tolerance interface between the mid and bass enclosures that meant you didn't have to construct and break up the speaker every time you set it up! When I say stupidly high tolerance, the two faces of the enclosures were made with metal plates which were so finely cut from solid billets that it was guaranteed that the distance between the plates when the appropriate spacers are in place is guaranteed to be 0.2mm all along the surface of the plates (about 8"). This acts as a sealed enclosure just like the SBL supposedly.

The 3-way DBL (Damn Big Loudspeaker) was based on the same principles but taken to even crazier lengths.

Having the Naim brand on the front is actually not necessarily a good thing since Naim have a reputation for making uniquely quirky speakers. It's enough to put many people off. Naim have voiced the speakers using their electronics obviously but they have taken a new direction to address specifically their relative lack of success with speakers and designed them to match more electronics I believe.

It looks a complex and well thought out design that offers a lot for the money.

It's true that you rarely see naim speakers out side Naims own electronics, as other brands are used like the Neat MFS range which were very complex speakers, Derek at Kudos told me how difficult they were to make and how he ended up with very sore knuckles when he used to make them.

Do Rega have a high end speaker? What with their new products they seem to have a matching speaker missing, is this the next product for the rega boys?