So a cheque for £40k arrives, not from an incident with some hippos but just the result of old age and a heart attack, my mortgage has a year or two to run and I'm only paying 1.1% interest on it anyway so might as well ignore that. My system at the time was all Naim except the turntable so what this Naimie does is replace the 282 preamp with a new 552, that takes care of half of it, it also frees up the supercap to power the superline phonostage. That leaves me with a 250 power amp with sources of a Rock mk2 with a Naim Aro arm carrying a Tranfiguration Proteus and a Naim CDX2 with a 555ps power supply. Round about this time Naim launches their recent Uniti products, Atom etc, it doesn't take much prescience to realise a revamp of their streamers is on the way so I decide to wait for whatever replaces the NDS (which showed promise but didn't entirely convince) as I already have the necessary power supply and I bought a Core to rip my CD
and a cheap Rega DAC to use it with
in the meantime. Now that leaves me with a chunk of money in the bank and I make the assumption that the new NDS will cost around half of what's left or less so when an Artemis SA-1 turntable catches my eye in a not too distant dealer i go and investigate, it turns out that it belonged to Frank Schroeder who used it at shows and it comes with the offer of jumping the queue for one of his Reference tonearms, the temptation is too much so that is £9k gone but I still think I have enough for the streamer when it comes. Time passes and the new streamers are announced but instead of replacing the NDS Naim come out with the ND555 which is £13000 at launch but at least my existing ps will power it it so I find the extra and order one of those too.
Not strictly to brief but it has the excuse of more or less happening like that. The exception is that it was actually 2 lots of ~£40k a couple of years apart, this first (which was from an aunt) bought me an Indian Roadmaster to suppliment my 1981 Moto Guzzi and my wife insisted on a new kitchen but the second lot and some additional funds were spent roughly as described with the addition of a used 500 power amp which went off to Naim for a service and updating to the latest spec, I've now run out of aunts and parents.
I have absolutely no regrets of any of this but my father's last year was difficult to endure, you can grieve while someone is still alive as you watch them slip away and it's all the more paimful.
I expect this is no use to the Op as Naim prices in the States are a tad higher so his £56K won't go quite as far and I somehow doubt Naim is his thing anyway. The ND555 is a peach by the way but would set you back $30k with the power supply last time I looked.
