For anyone outside of the very specific high-end audio circles, and anyone unfamiliar with the contrived stories of some of the hifi brands, it is hard to understand some announcements. It would seem unlikely in this day and age that there would be any demand for more of such products, considering the extreme efforts placed in designing and manufacturing pieces of equipment such as a turntable. Particularly for a company that never made turntables in its history. And yet, this a very lucrative segment of the market which is able to sustain even the wildest concepts - for those who truly appreciate the expense and inconvenience.
“Solstice Special Edition offers an exceptional all-round experience,” says Paul Neville, Naim Audio Research & Development Director. “If you love the organic, authenticity of vinyl, now you can enjoy it with the musical purity and passion only a Naim system can deliver.”
So, this is not only a very exclusive turntable, it is also a collectors item and a commemorative product for those devoted to the British brand - now part of the Vervent Audio Group since its merger with Focal-JMlab in 2011. According to the announcement, the new Naim Solstice Turntable NVS TT combines "core Naim design philosophies, such as multiple levels of mechanical decoupling," with "a celebration of beautiful materials."
The turntable is promoted for featuring a magnetic bearing supporting a high-mass, highly polished aluminum platter, with a unique, self-calibrating motor drive system. It leverages the Naim Aro Tonearm retaining the original’s design principles but boosting performance further still by using improved materials – including tungsten and carbon-fiber - and adding an all-new, no-compromise bias, arm height and azimuth adjustments.
And the set is complemented with a Naim Equinox MC Cartridge featuring a microline stylus shape, which is said to be closer to the original cutting lathe head to enable the retrieval of accurate high-frequency information. It also features a boron cantilever, a stiff-but-light design that faithfully transfers the stylus movements to the moving coils.
And the Naim team also assumed that whoever would invest in such a product would require a dedicated phono preamp stage - because there are never enough phono preamps! Even at an age where the vast majority of vinyl buyers has no idea what RIAA means. And so, a dedicated separated box was designed - because, remember, true vinyl aficionados do love the inconvenience!
The Naim Solstice Series Phono Stage NVC TT is described as a sophisticated, ultra-low-noise Class A design with dedicated MC and MM head-amplifiers, using the same circuit first used on the Naim Statement amplifier, which by itself was already an historical crazy enough project. For those not familiar with the brand, Naim always focused on amplification and that included phono stages. Even after the arrival of CD in the 1980s, Naim continued to champion vinyl, producing the ARO tone arm in 1989, followed by the Armageddon Power Supply and a series of "acclaimed phono stages."
And of course, no such endeavor would stand in this market without a separate box for the power supply. And that is the Naim Solstice Series Power Supply NPX TT, which powers both the turntable and the phono stage, paving the way for more expensive cables with dedicated connectors to be added. But no risk of interference!
Finally, the limited set includes accessories such as a digital stylus gauge (digital? Heresy!), a bubble level, hex drivers (x3), a vinyl adjustment tool, dust protector and cleaning cloth, a sample NAIM album containing a curated collection of "superb-quality True Stereo recordings," newly remastered for vinyl by the original engineer, Ken Christiansen. And finally, the very limited turntable is sold with an exclusive Solstice Special Edition Book, including insights into the heritage, technology and design of such a project.
The Solstice Special Edition turntable is indeed a unique and beautiful design - if you disregard the two separated ugly boxes on the side. The turntable plinth was painstakingly crafted from 47 separate layers of wood, and the cartridge sits in a solid aluminum housing machined from a single billet. And Naim highlights the fact that the turntable is simple enough to set up and use: "it offers incredible sound quality without the complications associated with performance turntables." The Solstice Series NVC TT phono stage and NPX TT power supply are hand-built by Naim in Salisbury, UK, while the NVS TT turntable, Aro arm and Equinox cartridge are manufactured by Clearaudio, the Erlangen, Germany-based turntable specialist.
Available from late July 2021, only 500 sets of the Naim Audio Solstice Special Edition will be available from select retailers worldwide, with a suggested selling price of $20,000 USD or €17,000 EUR. A bargain! As the true vinyl aficionados will notice, you could spend more than that on a cartridge alone!
www.naimaudio.com/solstice
www.naimaudio.com
