Naim Uniti Atom
£1,750, naimaudio.com
It can’t only be me who finds the process of unfurling gold-tipped, PVC-clad speaker cables strangely exciting.
Sadly for myself and other middle-aged weirdos, it’s all too rare a pleasure in today’s world of all-in-one speakers that, boringly, work straight out of the box.
I blame young people for this.
The Uniti (part of a shamelessly pricey family of gizmos) is a gorgeous unit, with lights gleaming out from the front LCD panel
So I rather enjoyed wiring up the Naim Uniti Atom’s system with a set of suitably plush speakers. It’s the new, more grown-up sibling to Naim’s superb Mu-So wireless speaker – a gadget about which I have bored my friends stiff over the past couple of years.
The award-winning Mu-So offers wi-fi music with hi-fi oomph, courtesy of a British amplifier brand with four decades of experience and the confidence to charge £900 for a metal cuboid. But if the all-in-one Mu-Sos are a bit ‘my first hi-fi’, the Uniti family are rather more grown up – with a posh amp inherited from Naim’s separates systems and enough power to drive decent-sized speakers (you have to buy your own).
The Uniti (part of a shamelessly pricey family of gizmos) is a gorgeous unit, with lights gleaming out from the front LCD panel. There’s an excellent app that allows you to summon music via wi-fi from streaming services or PC hard drives, or via the worse-sounding Bluetooth (if you’re feeling lazy).
You can also add a ludicrously over-the-top Core CD ripper that stores 100,000 high-quality tracks in a hard drive. That will set you back another £1,800 – but in a world where Apple can charge a grand for a phone you’ll probably lose in three months, is that so insane?