Thanks all for the feedback - just to clarify the situation
The house is 23 years old and the supply comes in from the street via a subterranean cable.
The breaker box is earthed to the water supply pipe - and I could not detect any grounding problems at the breaker box or anywhere else in the house - I have verified there are no spurious voltages between neutral and ground anywhere in the house (tested with a very good digital meter for resistance, continuity, AC and DC Voltage) - particularly at the outlets with appliance connected - BTW all appliances are new this year - so no old lunkers are causing problems.
I also tested the equipment with only the dedicated line to the hi-fi turned on - YES - I took all of the other breakers offline.
Each piece of equipment (has a two pin polarized plug) was tested without connecting it to the amp and found that Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer and Toshiba all had a 1.5-2.0v AC voltage between neutral of each phono socket (and also the chassis) and the ground of the outlet they were plugged into - I also verified that the outlet did not have any spurious voltage present before plugging in the equipment - However on testing the Cambridge Audio sources and the Luxman sources I found they did not produce any voltage between their phono neutral or chassis - so they work well with the amp.
I have spoken to NAIM tech support and they indicated that their design philosophy is somewhat different from that of the consumer electronics manufacturers and that difference results in a hum when used with them.
Their solution is to use a ground loop isolation device which are commonly available, between the amp and DVD player.
I would guess that other hi-fi oriented manufacturers adopt a different design philosophy that allows consumer electronics to be connected without a problem, because I have not found too much on this topic - other than the normal ground loop problems due to bad cabling/mains/ground etc...