Naim Audio has proudly designed and handcrafted music systems in the historic English city of Salisbury for almost 50 years. Just outside the city lies the World Heritage site of Stonehenge, its Neolithic standing stones perfectly framing the movements of the sun. We didn’t need to look far for naming inspiration for this very Special Edition, nor did we need to deviate from our own heritage: although Solstice is our first turntable, we have been venerating vinyl since the genesis of Naim in the late 1960s.

Limited to just 500 units, this Special Edition includes the Solstice turntable, a next-generation version of the iconic Naim Aro tonearm, an Equinox MC cartridge, Solstice Series Phono Stage, Power Supply and bespoke accessories set.  The Solstice turntable combines core Naim design philosophies, such as multiple levels of mechanical decoupling, with a celebration of beautiful materials. It features a magnetic bearing supporting a high-mass, highly polished aluminium platter, with a unique, self-calibrating motor drive system, meticulously delivering the Naim sound.

The Special Edition package also includes a commemorative book, plus the Naim Records True Stereo album – a curated collection of superb-quality True Stereo recordings, newly remastered for vinyl.

Naim products aim to be both timeless and contemporary. Our designs eschew unnecessary visual adornment that do not serve performance goals. Solstice Special Edition design is functionally coherent, encourages use, sharp - almost brutalist - and wears its innovative materials and design solutions with pride.

Our founder, Julian Vereker often considered a Naim-designed turntable. Tragically, he never realised his plans before his untimely death in 2000. However, his legacy lives on with this project and the team behind Solstice Special Edition.

Legendary Naim Technical Director, Roy George, came out of retirement to work on the Solstice Special Edition project, explains: “I still often think about Julian, and how he would have regarded the products we have designed since he died." "I believe he would have very much approved of the engineering solutions and final performance of the Solstice Special Edition.”

Even after the arrival of CD in the 1980s, Naim continued to champion vinyl, producing the iconic ARO tone arm in 1989. Aro has always set a benchmark in terms of delivering incredibly natural, organic and lifelike musical performances. Its design allows the cartridge to extract enormous amounts of the information from the grooves of a vinyl record, but with an incredible sense of flow and correctness to the resulting sound.

Updating Aro for Solstice Special Edition involved retaining the original’s design principles and excellence, but boosting performance further still by using improved materials – including tungsten and carbon-fibre - and adding an all-new, no compromise bias, arm height and azimuth adjustments.

New Aro may be stiffer still, but its approach is more flexible: it retains the familiar three-point fixing – maximising the integrity of the critical interface with the Equinox cartridge – but also has two-point, slotted fixings for alternative cartridges. There’s even finally a lift-lower device.

The Equinox cartridge's Moving Coil (MC) inner assembly sits in a solid aluminium housing machined from a single billet. A raked silver polished chamfer passes over the black cartridge edges, simultaneously communicating the unseen facets of the diamond stylus and giving a nod to heritage Naim ‘chrome bumper’ designs.

Equinox is an MC cartridge with a microline stylus shape - closer to the original cutting lathe head to enable the retrieval of accurate high-frequency information. To maximise stability and energy transfer, the stylus, cantilever and motor components are securely clamped to the cartridge body, which itself is attached to the headshell with a three-point fixing.