I don’t understand that either. The NADs seem to get overly positive responses in comparison to the heated discussions in various AVR reviews here.
I don't think it is a NAD brand-affinity thing. Most of the recent NAD traditional products (NAD AVRs for example) got trashed in the reviews and comments while there were obvious NAD fans that came to its defenses which happens in any brand review.
I think this is more of a Class D and latest technology affinity thing. Class D is in some sense the poster child for a measurement based approach and implicitly a favored child because of it perhaps. If another brand does a better implementation of Purifi and/or for a lower cost, I think NAD would be forgotten in a jiffy.
If NAD would have designed the amp boards themselves that would be pretty good.
But they took the excellent purifi modules and degraded their performance a fair bit.
I agree. This is what the problem is in an objective evaluation geared towards engineering standards.
Maybe we should get more multi channels amp, to review, but so far it's the second best "performing" multi channel amp here, only beaten by an other NAD amp. Overly positive, maybe, but is there something better out there? If it haven't been found, it's hard to criticise, If it has been done better, let's look at it and assess that it underperforms.
Yes and no. I think Amir has posted before that ASR does not do relative grading. The review itself is, in theory, an objective evaluation of the DUT with respect to engineering standards that it should strive towards (and this is what I have always liked about this site). It does not depend on whether something else better is out there or not for the recommendations. With just that in mind, I think the NAD unit is a swing and miss at best.
It was my impression that objective criterion like avoiding engineering lapses (bad grounding for example), not meeting full potential of components used (DAC chips or Class D module, etc), were things that weighed in on the subjective part of the review while also considering price and uniqueness as a category (multi-channel amp is not a unique enough category). This is where I am disappointed.
You have a valid point of comparing other available products as a consumer wishing to purchase. This is where comparison to ATI etc, becomes relevant and should have common set of measurements to compare. I tried comparing it to the 2-channel ATI amp (but modular where the same chassis is designed to accommodate multiple modules) measured here earlier. Nothing compelling on the NAD (except wide-band FR) despite using a more advanced amp module. We don't have measurements like the multi-tone IMD for the NAD to compare against the earlier ATI measurements, so it becomes difficult to compare all aspects and see if there are clear wins.
As a consumer, I don't care if it has the latest Class D technology or not but whether it has the price/performance I need, of course and that includes the universe of all multi-channel amps not just Class D based ones.