Crystalline Sound, Thrifty Build

I am the type of person who cringes and turns away in disgust every time I see an item made of polyethylene plastic - even if it is a cheap children's toy, or something disposable. So when I carefully unwrapped this item and observed that I had paid the greater part of a thousand dollars for a piece of equipment with a cheap polyethylene volume knob my impulse was to feel scandalized.

But by the time I had fastened the speaker wire firmly to the binding posts, it was clear from the attention to functional details that the engineers at NAD were clearly and unambiguously focused on bringing the best sound value for the dollar. And if that meant making the screw posts a bit more durable or gold plating the RCA connectors instead of providing a nicely machined aluminum or even a smooth and shiny resin knob, that's what they did. And I'm now OK with that.

The sound that the amplifier produces is smooth, solid, crystalline. Driving a set of DCM Time Windows speakers, I hear for the first time in my own home what I did in the showroom twenty years ago when I chose them - a sense of presence. The sound system is transparent as if the music is being performed in my own living room. One gets this sense time after time. With the volume knob turned a third of the way to MAX, the volume is well on its way to being deafening in loud passages, but there is pristine control at all frequencies.

I find that at low listening levels I do need to boost the bass and treble, but I understand that this is due to a minor weakness of the speakers (and of the human hearing mechanism - and I miss the Loudness Knob on the twenty year old Denon system this one replaces.)

NAD distinguished itself in the early 1980's with its 'soft clipping' feature which eliminated the kind of hissy noises an amplifier will produce when it does not have sufficient power to reproduce the loudest peaks in the music.

At the loudest listening levels tested there are occasionally some artifacts in the attack of a concert piano that have a sonic flaw. Having never heard it before nor heard it described, It is not clear to me whether this is a special kind of distortion, soft clipping, or some speaker limitation. I am inclined to believe it is the latter, but if it is soft clipping, it is certainly more desirable than the old kind of clipping. That hissing and buzzing that once accompanied clipping in these same passages at much lower listening levels with the old 85 W/channel system is completely absent. And this is a great improvement.

Sometimes the clear, transparent, crystalline quality strikes me as being just a little severe, just a little clinical. I go onto the patio, leave the patio door open and listen to the sound pour out through the closed screen door. The reverberation in a room with carpeting, wood floors, and so on gives the sound a bit more of a natural timbre. The music has place. And I recall reading from time to time of recordings made in the depth of night in the homes of musicians precisely to get this sense of place. The sound of the musical instruments interacting with the room is better for the same reason that one sets a fine diamond in an elaborate or elegant setting. Fortunately there is no question about getting the volume of sound adequate for even this remote setting.

For those who want the most solid, clear sound for a modest price but do not need to have a piece of decorator furniture, this is a very good choice.