SUPERNAIT 3 has received significant performance upgrades, including a built-in phono stage, making it a perfect partner for turntables, as well as for streamers, CD players, or any other music source people want to enjoy with the signature Naim sound. It also includes a Class A preamp output stage which doubles as a headphone amplifier and ceramic heatsink technology that minimises capacitive coupling between the chassis and output transistors for optimum sound quality.
Features:
Class A headphone amplification
Alps Blue Velvet volume control
Reed relay input selection
Ceramic insulators for the power transistors
Galvanically isolated microprocessor control section
Our R&D team has found a way to more than double the speed of the voltage gain stage, which in turn doubles the rate at which the speaker output stage can react.
The second gain stage transistors have been optimised, so they no longer need to be shielded by a cascode stage transistor. Removing the cascode means less amplifier stabilisation is required: that doubles the slew rate and delivers an uplift in sound quality.
The phono circuit topology comprises 3 stages: the gain stage, passive equalisation and final gain and active equalisation. This enables excellent noise performance, extended RIAA equalisation beyond the audio band and great overload headroom.
All RIAA equalisation capacitors and the RIAA resistors are ‘through-hole’ mounted film designs, with low microphonic pickup and excellent transient performance. As phono stages are 1000x more sensitive than other inputs, this greatly benefits the sound quality.
Input impedance is 47kΩ in parallel with 470pF capacitive loading; the gain is perfect for 5mV moving magnet cartridges.