This is a $2,700 product. The price is already high. As consumers, we have the right to expect more in a product like this. It is their job to rise to the challenge, or not. The ones that do will absolutely get more sale as we have seen in desktop products already since I started to measure them. The cost has not increased in them to get there.
I keep hearing stories of desktop audio companies buying the Audio Precision analyzers to make sure their devices measure well prior to releasing. We have already impacted that market in a very good way.
This is no different than quality control in a product. Don't pay attention to it and you produce garbage. But the moment a spotlight is put on it, and there are alternatives with better quality, companies pay attention.
We are in early days with AVRs. As we test more of them and show the issue, they word will get around. Don't have a defeatist attitude and accept what is. We should not for this kind of money.
I am explaining the situation, not accepting it as what it should be. It is a bit presumptuous to think these measurements are going to influence the market beyond a niche segment (of the type who frequent this rather than AVSforums). But, I am OK with being optimistic. Why not?
WE are not representative of the market place consumers which is split between best features and power for the buck (for whom the units have been continually improving given where they were) and the affluent who buy the life style type of units that can get the magazine reviewers to wax poetic. Desktop product market is much more of a fragmented niche “enthusiast” market. The mass market there is taken by phones, pods and buds and Sonos and such who are not going to listen to distortion specs. I don’t know more than one or two non-techie people in my network who even know a DAC product exists or that they should use a head-phone amp and headphones. Some inroads here because of the fragmented market for enthusiasts is not going to generalize.
NAD cannot compete with Yamahas, D&Ms and Sony’s for shelf space regardless of how clean they make their DACs. The affluent who depend on high-end store recommendations and audio consultants buy things that are 10x as much. They are not going to be influenced by just cleaner specs unless it is as obvious as Dirac correction (which is why NAD is investing in those licenses).
For people like NAD, they have to overprice it to survive and reduce their costs by slashing design and QA. Wanting cleaner specs from them is not a realistic goal. You are not going to be able to shame them into rethinking their designs. Perhaps, some product manager will say are we measuring OK in response to these for the next product but that is far from making it into design goals.
But this is not to say, it will not improve.
Coffee market in the US is a good analogy. Most coffee in the US was really bad except in some boutique stores in the Northwest or Northeast right up to the time Starbucks came into the picture. Until then, it was just different tiers of bad, even when you paid a lot in many high end restaurants.
What Starbucks did was not only to create a lifestyle brand but convince people that it had better coffee than what they used to have. Now, you can thumb your nose at Starbucks but compared to what was widely available at the time, it was better.
But, that coffee revolution did not happen because they just made a better product from looking at Italy. It was a combination of a business model and franchising innovation combined with store design and accompanying products that made it a success to create a lifestyle. Of course, as a side effect, it increased the availability of better coffee and better than Starbucks often as the demand for good coffee increased.
Something similar could happen in audio. Someone who would change the paradigm from the existing amp, pre-amp, integrated architecture to something that is designed bottom up for embedded home streamed/piped distribution and makes clean units as a differentiator over Sonos, PlayFi, etc. Then suddenly clean units become the thing to have and everyone follows, but it wouldn’t be the demand for “clean” that creates and establishes it.