Thank you for saving me money!This is a review and detailed measurements of the NAD M10 streaming amplifier and DAC. It was purchased and drop shipped to me kindly by a member. It costs US $2,749 from NAD dealers.
The M10 sports a very large touch screen LCD display that covers the entire front face:
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Sorry for leaving the protecting plastic on. Like to keep things as new as possible for members.
As nice as the display is, it simply is not as responsive as your phone or tablet. What could be really cool such as the VU meter mode, becomes a jittery display that doesn't please much. A much faster processor with GPU would be needed to really make the display the star. Still, it is heads and shoulders above others that have small displays.
The back panel is notable for inclusion of HDMI ARC input:
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Alas, I have no ARC capability on my workstation so could not test that feature.
In normal use the plastic case barely gets warm. Under heavy stress of power testing, it got somewhat warm making me wish the case was made out of aluminum than plastic. You are not likely to push the switching amplifiers this hard and at any rate, the M10 runs much cooler than any Audio/Video Receiver.
While I did not have time to test it, the M10 comes with Dirac Room EQ which is nice.
I noticed one operational/design issue. I unplugged the unit to take its picture but noticed that the display went crazy flashing random stuff. I thought it was a capacitor that was discharging but this continued and would not stop! I looked in the back and I realized I still had the HDMI cable plugged in. Knowing that it provides a 5 volt "hot plug" signal, I disconnected it and the display finally shut down. This is improper design. The device must NOT draw any power out of HDMI connection.
DAC Audio Measurements
I connected the Coax output of my Audio Precision APx555 analyzer to the M10 and measured what came out of the pre-out with volume adjusted for 2 volt output:
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Distortion is quite low at -110 dB (near threshold of hearing) but the noise floor kept jumping up and down causing SINAD to vary with it. This shows lack of isolation between sensitive DAC subsystem and busy processor running other functions of the device. As it is, performance is respectable which is a sigh of relief:
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Anything in green and blue is good.
Testing at other output levels shows that the M10 is capable of pumping out good bit of voltage:
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Dynamic range clears the bar for 16 bit CD/streaming content but not much more:
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IMD distortion versus level shows the same noise issue:
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Filter response also shows higher than it should be noise floor:
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Jitter and noise test shows a lot of unwanted tones but audibly they are below threshold of hearing:
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Linearity is very good:
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EDIT: forgot to include multitone in the original review:
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Finally, we see the penalty of the DAC filter not being sharp enough in distortion+noise versus frequency:
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Amplifier Audio Measurements
I was hoping that analog input was not digitized but alas, it is:
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And at very low sample rate. Maybe there is a setting to change this but I did not bother to look.
Using the same analog input, I witnessed wild swings in noise floor of the unit:
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So I abandoned the analog input and switched to Coax for the rest of the amplifier tests:
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Performance is improved and stable as well. This rates the M10 above average for more than 100 amplifiers tested so far:
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Signal to noise ratio is disappointing as even with full power, it barely clears the 16 bit hurdle:
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Frequency response using digital input is wide enough:
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But for those people with ultra sensitive high frequency hearing, you will lose half a dB at 20 kHz.
Let's see how much clean power we get out of M10 starting with 4 ohm load:
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I allowed the distortion to go higher (1%) and got even more power:
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I tried to get the burst power rating but some kind of limiter in the M10 was fighting the analyzer and wouldn't allow me to get there. It was nice that it would not shut down.
Power naturally drops at 8 ohm:
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Conclusions
Performance of the NAD M10 is generally acceptable especially for a multifunction device where we see a lot of fails. Alas issues here and there took away my enthusiasm for it. There is no excuse for poor analog input performance in a nearly $3000 device. Or rather high and variable noise floor.
So overall, I gave it a "like it" panther award but it is not something I would personally buy. I can be stubborn that way!
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
So stressed out with the terrible backlog of reviews, I have nothing sarcastic to say. So I will just ask that you donate what you can to change my mood using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
I wonder if the updated version is better?
NAD Masters Series M10 V2