Company & Product Overview
Naim is another British company Audio Advice is a big fan of. They have been quietly making great audio gear for over 40 years out of their factory in Salisbury, England. Naim has not spent a lot of money promoting themselves over the years but has let their products speak for themselves. Interestingly, they have one of the largest audio company user groups we have ever seen that is full of activity.
Naim started out making an external power supply for the Linn Sondek LP12 table and has focused on great power supplies since the beginning. Their 150+ employees design and make almost everything from the ground up in the UK factory. Even though they only make stereo components, their product catalog has over 50 pieces. Plus, they go from the stratosphere of $270,000 for their top of the line mono amps and preamp, down to very reasonably priced integrated amps.
Naim users normally fall in love with their sound, which we feel gets you very close to the emotion of a live concert.
About 5 years ago, Naim decided to enter the all-in-one speaker category with the Mu-so series. This was two fairly large speaker systems that offered a lot of the new types of connectivity for music streaming. These were very successful for Naim and introduced a whole new group of music lovers to the classic Naim sound. The look was also a departure from Naim’s conventional black all business boxes. Mu-so products have a very cool contemporary look with several color options on the sculpted grille.
Over the last 18 months, Naim has come up with a new platform for music streaming that first showed up in their Uniti series of integrated amps and recently made its way into all of their stand-alone music players. We suspected it would not be too long before the Mu-so series got an injection of this new tech. But in typical Naim fashion, they did not just add the new streaming engine but revamped almost everything in the Mu-so speakers to greatly improve their performance. Today’s review is on the new Mu-so QB 2 and Mu-so 2.
Design & Build Quality
When most people see a Mu-so product for the first time, their reaction is: wow, that is so cool! The Mu-so 2 and Mu-so QB2 do not look like conventional home audio products. They look like they belong in a modern art museum! The contrast of grey brushed aluminum, sculpted fabric grills, and acrylic accented with subtle lighting just makes you want to reach out and touch the large, multi-function knob recessed into the top panel. In other words, they are flat out beautiful!
The Mu-so 2 is much larger than the QB version sitting at about 25” wide, 11” deep and roughly 5” tall. The QB 2 is much more compact and cube-like being about an 8” cube. Both come with a black grill but have an optional Olive, Terracotta, and Peacock grilles.The grille fabric even looks like something you would see in a British woolen mill.
The Mu-so design goal is to give you an all-in-one, but great sounding and easy to use speaker system that can access your music in many different ways. Naim also wanted the Mu-so speakers to be able to easily fill up a room with big sound that had no strain as you cranked up the volume.
While the original Mu-so’s were simply astounding in the sound they produced for their size, Naim took the opportunity to completely redo both the internal cabinet and speaker drivers in both models. The improvements are not subtle, but huge!
Naim also took the control of the Mu-so 2 to a new level compared to the old with a redesigned, touch-sensitive multi-function knob.
The level of build quality on all Naim products is about as good as it gets. This is probably one reason Bentley chose Naim for their vehicles. The new Mu-so 2 series is impeccably finished and in many ways better put together than just about any piece of audio gear we have ever seen.
