Thank you! There are some music sequences the sn3 really shine in, everytime anything with drums and rapid fire music comes on it sounds very realistic. My family members heard from other rooms and came to hear going wow at how realistic hindi folk songs with dhols sounded. Vocal nuances are also well presented. I can make out the vocal extensions where the singer is finishing lyrics with some shaking in the voice. You can make out that they optimized this amp for performance music, where prat is actually more important and conventional amps fail. I was listening to swan lake and I could hear tiny tiny things the orchestral players were doing and the urgency of certain instruments. It felt as if they were on a stage infront. This sort of imaging is not there on the ca840av2 which is a more neutral and spectrum oriented amplification. But given the price difference, where the 840av2 was 75,000 INR 10 years ago (would be double today) and this is 5.3L today the ca 840aV2 is no slouch, as long as the 840a is paired with 90db efficient speakers where the volume is kept around 50% where it's class A function ends, the ca840av2 gives stiff competition to the naim. But if you push the 840 to 65% and above where it functions as class ab, there the ca840 shows its limitations. It loses definition the higher you go. But the naim SN3 on my jamo Concert 8s barely need to be raised from 6 o clock starting position to 8 o clock. 3 o clock is max and 9 o clock position makes my bookshelves hit like big floorstanders. This is not even 50%, it's just 35%. And it doesn't lose its definition as you keep raising the volume to unbearable levels. That's the biggest change.
The caveat of this amp being optimized for performance music and prat is that it's high frequencies are somewhat rolled off. So recordings where extreme hf samples are used, it is handled like an afterthought. This is where brands like luxman and accuphase excel. I heard a luxman 505, 550, 590 and sn3 side by side in Vegas in 2022 and I found all the naim amps handle sound in a different way where dynamic changes in impedance are very apparent giving music a certain life like character. The luxman 505 in comparison felt clinical and thin while the 590ax sounded amazing, with a warm romantic tonality similar to tubes, if it wasn't even more expensive I would have gone for the 590ax, but compared to the naim house sound the 590 felt like a beautiful technical demonstration of checking all the boxes. The performative impact of music is not there, even a 3k naim atom had more prat than the luxman 550 but without all the details and frequency control.
One has to hear it side by side to understand the impact prat has. It's literally the fun aspect of music. And it has a really strange way of drawing the listener in even with more transparent and better sound quality producing and better built competitors in the lineup. I suppose it appeals to the reptilian parts of our brains. Who knows.
One thing I don't like about the sn3 is that is doesn't like poor source material. So a lot of the old hindi music sounds 2 dimensional.