K400/2 Knekt vs Naim plug

[The FlatEarther]

Evening all.

Well what a journey I've had. Coyote Jim has bought new K200 cables and kindly sent me his old split k400/2. However he needed the plugs so the cable arrived sans connectors. No problem, I had some new Naim plugs and four used Knekts.

So I soldered Naim plugs at the amp end for my Naim 250 and the cleaned up the Knekts and then soldered the Linn Knekts at the speakers. Installed them last night sat back and had one of those instant love/hate moments.

I loved the improved dynamics, the tunefulness, the extra detail. But the overall tone was glary and harsh by comparison to the K20. Damn, damn and double damn I thought.

So I sat back thought surely it can't be the Naim plugs? After all a plug is a plug is a plug right!

Well not according to ThomasOK and Fred Lejonklou. Fred reckons he'd rather listen to mains cable with a Knekt rather than the best speaker cable with no Knekt on it it!

So Postman Pat delivered the new Knekts that I had ordered express from Peter (Cymbiosis). I duly pulled out the K400, went back out to my man cave (workshop), cut off the Naim plugs cut back to fresh copper and soldered on the Knekts.

And then................

Well I'll be dammned, trussed up and gobsmacked. The Linn Knekt plugs from Peter made such a difference I was shell shocked! Ok I had made sure that I had cut back to new copper and did a really top job of soldering on the new Knekt plugs, but wow?

Well you could knock me down with a feather. The previous glary harshness has completely gone to be replaced by a beautiful mellow tone with better tune, better dynamics and detail. How can a set of plugs make such a difference???

I guess once again ThomasOK and Fred LJ were spot on!

Well,I'm a happy camper.

A big thank you to TomOK for all your help. What a jolly decent chap.

Kind regards
Flat

[lejonklou]

I agree FlatEarther!

It's really strange that connectors can make such a big difference. I've tried terminating with bare copper wire and tinned copper wire, screwed in place with various torques. No success so far. Soldering Knekts onto the copper and inserting them into banana sockets of the right dimension (beware that some sockets are too tight and will damage Knekt! - the solution is then to use Deltron 550) is way superior.

A similar matter is mains inlets. They can sound unbelievably different. It boggles my mind how things so similar can differ so drastically. I recently found one of mine (a model selected from many on the merit of how it sounds) to be faulty. Nothing visibly wrong, but it sounded awful. Apparently it was the mains switch that had gone bad. A good lesson: Listen to everything, don't assume anything.

[Efraim roots]

Ok, sounds promising since I plan to try them on naca5. So you are using split k400 with an old nap 250? I've only heard reports saying that cable isn't naim friendly because of their speaker cable "thing", never dared to try it myself on my vintage stuff. Are you sure they are better than K20? Have you tried naca5?

[The FlatEarther]

Efraim, Naim amps have no problem with any Linn cable, it's the woven stuff you need to avoid.

Yes I've got 2x3.5m of terminated white NacA5 and 2x10m of terminated Black NacA5. I can't get on with either. It sounds a little more tuneful than K20, but sounds shut in and glary. Whereas the K20 is more open, more detailed, very much sweeter and allmost identically musical. Overall I much preferred K20 on both my 250/Briks and Nait/Saras.

But now I'm wondering if it's the Naim plugs. Hmm I must re-terminate a pair with Knekts and have another listen.

[lejonklou]

So you are using split k400 with an old nap 250? I've only heard reports saying that cable isn't naim friendly because of their speaker cable "thing"

The cable "thing" is capacitance. When the conductors are close, capacitance increases and inductance decreases. Naim's output stages were quasi complementary, which means they are prone to oscillation if the load is too capacitive.

Due to this, Naim designed a low capacitance loudspeaker cable: NACA4. Linn copied it and called it K20. Naim had to move on and made NACA5. Linn then made K400/600 (the square shaped single wire K200 that I first heard was never released, probably because they wanted to push their customers towards multi amp and aktiv, which sold more amplifiers), which had tightly twisted wires and thus higher capacitance.

[Efraim roots]

Thanks for the technical background Lejonklou.

Interesting what you write about the tested cables FlatEarther, I would be interested if you come back and comment on how naca5 perform with knekt banans. I sounds really odd that the Naim team from the heydays would put in such great amount of efforts in creating a new speaker cable (it was described as a really big and prestigious project by J Vereker in an interview I read) and then come up with an inferior one. Personally I'm starting with investigating optimal length, I've got myself some 8m lengths and going to cut them down step by step one at the time looking for the optimal, hopefully I'm not starting to short, if I do I hopefully can hear it very early. When listening to 3.5m -5m - 8m lengths it sounds like optimal would be between 5m and 8m. Any comments on that?

[The FlatEarther]

Hi Efraim, forgive me but I never said the Naim cable was inferior, just that I didn't like it. Maybe it reacts differently with Naim speakers. But for me K20 is clearly better and split K400 better still.
Merry Christmas.