Review and Measurements of NAD T758 V3 AVR

[soundwave76]

Wow. I have considered NAD a premium hifi brand...

 

[JJB70]

NAD were originally primarily a supplier of good, affordable equipment. They sort of inhabited the segment Schiit dreams of being in - supplying good equipment that punched above its weight for people that wanted performance without some of the cost. That was always a bit debatable in NAD gear but they did it an awful lot better than Schiit have. They left those roots behind many years ago.

 

[astr0b0y]

Wow. I have considered NAD a premium hifi brand...

I think this is an import area to explore. Why do you think this?
I get the feeling NAD thinks that the market feels this too and is exploiting it.

 

[restorer-john]

NAD were originally primarily a supplier of good, affordable equipment. They sort of inhabited the segment Schiit dreams of being in - supplying good equipment that punched above its weight for people that wanted performance without some of the cost. That was always a bit debatable in NAD gear but they did it an awful lot better than Schiit have. They left those roots behind many years ago.

NAD was never anything special. New Acoustic Dimension- what an awful name. It was plastered all over very ordinary receivers and amplifiers with wiggly switches and poor lighting, ugly cabinets and Taiwanese build quality.

They are still desperately hanging on to the "legend" of the 3020. A plastic knobbed and paneled, truly horrible product, made with ancient transistors at the time that performed OK. That's all, just OK. Myriad Japanese amplifiers at the same price or less outperformed it, comprehensively. But the UK press decided it was a "giant killer" and thousands were sold.

Iteration after iteration of 3020s. B series, E series etc.

 

[JJB70]

They are still hanging onto the 3020 name even today!!

 

[HLee]

Well, well, well. I'm actually not surprised at all. This is a very useful review I have to say. I'm even more interested in Anthem and Arcam units. Let's see if any manufacturer has a good AVR. Imo there was a bit to be gained with separate DAC with my Arcam so I'm guessing it doesn't measure quite reference either. But I would be surprised if it's as bad as this.

Neither am I.
Prices of multichannel AVR are similar or less than that of dedicated stereo amplifiers.
In that point of view, it is not suprising that only $40k AVR like casablanca IV, sounds better than highend stereoamp

 

[D700]

Not surprised. Bought and returned a C368 last year, sounded like crap.

 

[digicidal]

So I've lost hope on the C658 now... sucks - feature-wise it ticks all the boxes I want in a single unit - but considering the performance of the other NAD products reviewed here, I'll just write it off even without measurements. If they had good engineering in anything... they'd likely have it in everything. It's not like they can't afford competent engineers and test equipment - they simply choose not to I guess. Sad.

 

[LTig]

Given the startling bang-for-buck of active monitors such as the JBL LSR305, I wonder if we should instead be encouraging manufacturers to revive their PrePro offerings instead?

I second that.

Strip out some of the excess such as poor quality amps and instead support XLR outputs!

You mean like what Marantz does? Rip out the power amps, put in XLR output and increase the price although the parts cost goes down?

I still have my Marantz AV7701 available. It is now a few generations behind, on the other hand the specs have not changed at all - indeed they are identical for all AV77xx and AV88xx so chances are high that newer models perform similar. I could do these measurements

• THD
• Multitone
• IMD
• Jitter
• frequency response
• channel crosstalk

on these inputs

• SPDIF coax
• SPDIF Toslink
• analog line level
• analog phono

in these modes:

• standard (Audissey off)
• direct
• pure direct

Is there any interest? If yes which measurements should I do?

 

[LTig]

Neither am I.
Prices of multichannel AVR are similar or less than that of dedicated stereo amplifiers.
In that point of view, it is not suprising that only $40k AVR like casablanca IV, sounds better than highend stereoamp

1. The Casablanca IV is a processor and has no power amps inside, so you still need power amps. Its big plus though is the modular construction, but it comes at a very high price.
2. It would surprise me if the Casablanca IV sounds better than a highend stereo preamp. As far as I can see the results of the Casablanca IV at hometheaterhifi.com are not better than what @amirm measured with the Marantz AV8805 at a cost of $4.5k. The results of my Classé Sigma SSP at $6k are clearly much better than both.

 

[AudioSceptic]

NAD were originally primarily a supplier of good, affordable equipment. They sort of inhabited the segment Schiit dreams of being in - supplying good equipment that punched above its weight for people that wanted performance without some of the cost. That was always a bit debatable in NAD gear but they did it an awful lot better than Schiit have. They left those roots behind many years ago.

I think that all of us in the UK over a certain age remember the early budget NAD amps (and tuners to a lesser extent) being giant-killers. A fun trick was to connect some "super amp" to, say, Linn Isobariks or Saras and see it brought to its knees, and then bring in the NAD 3020 (20W/ch budget integrated) at a tiny fraction of the price and hear it play music at a decent level. The more expensive NAD stuff never had the same impact.

 

[digitalfrost]

The NAD C 320BEE was the first "audiophile" amp I ever bought. I was happy with it for a long time, and as the review shows it's a solid device.

With all of the bad reviews various NAD gear has gotten here lately, I can no longer recommend that company to any layman asking me for advice. NAD used to be a company for me, where I could trust you get your money's worth, and most importantly, even if it was not the best product in the price range, you didn't buy junk.

Oh boy.

I would be interested in a review of the M22 NC400 amplifiers.

 

[HLee]

1. The Casablanca IV is a processor and has no power amps inside, so you still need power amps. Its big plus though is the modular construction, but it comes at a very high price.
2. It would surprise me if the Casablanca IV sounds better than a highend stereo preamp. As far as I can see the results of the Casablanca IV at hometheaterhifi.com are not better than what @amirm measured with the Marantz AV8805 at a cost of $4.5k. The results of my Classé Sigma SSP at $6k are clearly much better than both.

I'm sorry that I said "highend stereo amp". I never had highend stereo preamps but AV processors like Lexicon MC12, Marantz 8802.
I just had a chance to compare CB IV, Emotiva RMC 1, Marantz 8805 all together.
At that time CB IV sounded best and RMC1 , 8805 in order. I dont know what makes CB sounds better but it sounded good to me.

 

[LTig]

I think that all of us in the UK over a certain age remember the early budget NAD amps (and tuners to a lesser extent) being giant-killers. A fun trick was to connect some "super amp" to, say, Linn Isobariks or Saras and see it brought to its knees, and then bring in the NAD 3020 (20W/ch budget integrated) at a tiny fraction of the price and hear it play music at a decent level. The more expensive NAD stuff never had the same impact.

The NAD 2200 power amps were also quiet famous at their time.

 

[LuckyLuke575]

>sees broken pink panther
>Oh boy, here we go...

EDIT: Gotta love all the stickers on the front... Hi-Res Music! MQA! Dolby Atmos! Ain't nothing Hi-Res about this...

The stickers are a total hoax man. This test invalidates a whole section of the audio market and industry. Whenever you walk into audio shops / hifi departments they always showcase these units as the "high end" equipment, like don't waste your time with anything 'less'; it's a total joke.

 

[LTig]

I'm sorry that I said "highend stereo amp". I never had highend stereo preamps but AV processors like Lexicon MC12, Marantz 8802.
I just had a chance to compare CB IV, Emotiva RMC 1, Marantz 8805 all together.
At that time CB IV sounded best and RMC1 , 8805 in order. I dont know what makes CB sounds better but it sounded good to me.

If it was a sighted listening probably not the SQ but other things. We can't trust what our brain deduces from all those different sources of knowledge ...

 

[soundwave76]

I think this is an import area to explore. Why do you think this?
I get the feeling NAD thinks that the market feels this too and is exploiting it.

Good question. Recently Bluesound has been advertised to be premium over for example Sonos, because of it's ties with NAD. I am happy with my Node2i even though it measured below average here in ASR. I am using it via coax out though which has good measurements.

 

[anmpr1]

I sent my Pioneer AVR review to my contact there. He didn't even reply to my message.

These companies just don't give a damn. Very sad. To compare, years ago I had a Pioneer SA-9500 amplifier. I took it to the local McIntosh clinic (where they'd test any and all amps if you brought yours in), and it did well. The dealer said something to the effect that "You've got a good amp, kid. Bring it by if you want to trade up, I'll make you a sweet deal." Or something like that. Of course, as a kid I couldn't afford a Mac.

I sent a letter (in those days no email) to Pioneer with a copy of the test report, telling them I was happy with their product. In return I got a typed hand signed letter from the president of Pioneer America (or his secretary) thanking me for being happy with their product. Along with the letter, Pioneer sent me a bunch of swag, a book about hi-fi they were 'selling', and a stack of catalogs on their line. They thanked me for being their customer.

 

[LuckyLuke575]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the NAD T758 V3 Home Theater Audio/Video Receiver (AVR). It was kindly sent to me by a member. The T758 appears to have been released last year and costs US $1,399.

The T758 is quite a bit heavier than recently measured AVRs and has a serious, business-like look that I appreciate:

View attachment 32829​

As you see, there are hardly any buttons on the front. To change settings, you push the Menu button and then navigate using the 4-way control. I am used to such controls have a center "enter" button but this one does not. Instead you had to push the right button to go into that setting. And left to get out. I could not get used to this and kept pushing the thing in.

The 4-way control is almost too responsive. It can double select easily so it would be nice if it had a bit more "key debounce" control. Nothing major though.

The menus are all text and continue the business-like feel of the unit which I was fine with. No need to wait 5 seconds for the slow CPU in these units to draw a picture of a living room for you.

The back panel shows a modular architecture where all the digital AV switching is on a vertical card to the left:

View attachment 32830​

Given the thin margins on these products, I have yet to see a company provide any upgrades of such modules in the future that makes economic sense. I did like the organization though of having them grouped in one place, and the amplifier/analog ins and outs elsewhere.

The speaker terminals are a little less flimsy than some of the other AVRs I have tested but still won't give you a feeling of luxury.

I get a kick out of IEC inputs that lack safety ground. I guess they give you modularity and ability to change to a different power cord compared to the cheap units of the past with the wires coming out of the unit. Similarly it is cute to see the switched outlet in there. I can see an old-timer at NAD insisting on having this connector even though the consumer will likely never use it as he has a lot more than one other device to connect (cable box, etc.).

I could not find any "pure" or "direct" mode to bypass internal processing. There is such a mode though but it is hidden as you will see in testing.

There are hefty, albeit small heatsinks inside. They are quite far from the top of the unit so can't feel them for how hot they get. The top of the unit though was hardly warm even through my testing. I am assuming some kind of power supply rail switching (i.e. Class G) is used in the amplification to keep power consumption low.

The NAD T758 comes with Dirac Lite room equalization which if it works right, should make it audibly perform better than many AVRs that use lesser systems.

Despite my complaints here and there, my overall impression of the NAD T578 was a positive one. It definitely sets its apart from mass-market brand AVRs.

AVR DAC Testing
For testing, I started with S/PDIF coax input since my analyzer can control it without issue unlike HDMI. HDMI results will come in the next section. For output, I used the convenient pre-amp output. Here is what the "DAC" portion performs:

View attachment 32831

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. When set to 0 dB volume on the unit, you get massive harmonic distortion with the third harmonic dominating. As a result, the NAD T758 takes the dubious crown of worst measured DAC of any product I have tested:
View attachment 32832

We can get much better results by dialing the input level or volume control by 6 dB:

View attachment 32833

But now, we have an unfair comparison as the output level has dropped to just 1 volt. But even going with this, the T758 cannot escape the fourth and worst quadrant SINAD of any DAC tested.

Notice that even at this lowered volume, we have issues with noise. The FFT noise floor is quite high and SINAD is determined by that, rather than distortion products. A problem that we see when we measure its dynamic range:

View attachment 32834

The problem with rising distortion with level shows up clearly in intermodulation distortion versus level:

View attachment 32835

As you see, you best avoid the last 6 dB of your dynamic range. Even putting that side, the high noise level lowers performance significantly at lower input levels.

Linearity test shows improper signal processing in conversion of 24 bit samples in the input signal to something lower:

View attachment 32836

You are barely good enough for 16 bit content.

Distortion products are quite visible in 32 tone intermodulation test:
View attachment 32837

If you want your signal to be free of distortion products, you only have 70 dB or 11.6 bits to work with! I have seen tube products with less distortion than this.

To see what is going on, I set the sampling rate to 192 kHz and ran a frequency response sweep. Ideally we would see 96 kHz of flat response:

View attachment 32838

But we don't. Response ends at 48 kHz or so, telling me perhaps the input is resampled to 96 kHz. If so, this is twice as good as the recent Pioneer VSX-LX504 I tested so by itself is not bad. Then again, someone sticking a S/PDIF cable into this receiver doesn't expect to see it resampled by half.

The resampling process seems to also reduce low frequency response as we are down 0.7 dB at the low end, and 0.9 dB at 20 kHz. Small numbers to be sure but in this day and age, I better get flat response from 20 Hz to 20 kHz when I running at 192 kHz sampling rate.

THD+N versus frequency shows what we already know:

View attachment 32839

Except that now we see a rise in high frequency distortion to boot! And no, this is not caused by ultrasonics. It is the clipping behavior I showed in the dashboard.

Could it commit any more sins? It can in the form of jitter:
View attachment 32840

OK, this is not end of the world but clean it isn't. Thankfully, likely it is not "audioble."

DAC filter response is fine but plateaued at just -60 dB:
View attachment 32841

HDMI DAC Performance
I routed the output of my PC through the T758 so that I could then send audio to use using WASAPI exclusive mode in my Roon media player. Here is our dashboard again, this time with HDMI as the input to the unit:

View attachment 32842

Overall distortion are there and set the SINAD limit to similar value. But in addition, we have a ton of "junk" thrown in there for good measure.

Jitter test generates similar outcome to S/PDIF input:

View attachment 32843

This says that we don't have input specific jitter but rather, just garbage leaking into the output of the DAC from various sources. There is a pattern in there which may indicate data dependent jitter (which is worse that random).

Based on these results, we know that our S/PDIF input is representative of HDMI performance.

AVR Amplifier Audio Measurements
The amplifier in these products is wideband, giving us an opportunity to diagnose further how the audio pipeline works. Let's start by feeding the unit analog input through CD jack and measuring the frequency response. And the compare the same to using multi-channel input:
View attachment 32845

Ah, we see that the roll off is gone when you use multichannel input. So it seems that the NAD's notion of "pure" or "pure direct" is to use the analogy 7.1 input -- a relief for people who have sources such as SACD players for this type of use.

The digitization of the CD input is quite harsh at just 44.1 kHz. Why not humor us with something higher than this?

Alas, we are limited by the performance of the power amplifier so using multi-channel input versus CD doesn't make much of a difference:
View attachment 32844

View attachment 32846

This gives pretty poor scores in ranking of the amplifiers we have tested:
View attachment 32847


Multichannel input has lower noise floor though:
View attachment 32848

Most important test is power versus distortion+noise. Here it is at 4 ohm:
View attachment 32849

That is healthy amount of power so putting aside the high noise floor, this is not too bad.

Power drops as expected into 8 ohm:
View attachment 32850

Peak power is much more as expected:

View attachment 32851

But far short of the spec although they use a different standard than what is used in my testing.

Stability was excellent at 50 watts into 4 ohm. Unlike the Pioneer amplifiers I have tested, there was no massive pull-back after a few seconds.


View attachment 32852

Conclusions
The overall fit and finish of the NAD T758 V3 was to my liking as I reported earlier. Alas, objective performance is quite shameful. It appears that no testing was performed for the digital processing or even simple distortion measurements. No wonder that outside of the amplifier, NAD doesn't provide any specifications. It appears that even after you spend $1,400, you get distortion and noise factory in these AVRs. A $9 Apple dongle easily outperforms what these devices produce.

These companies need to have a reset, go back to the drawing board and have proper architectural review and design verification. It won't cost any money to get better performance. Despite being a 20 year old part, the DAC chip they use is spec'ed at 96 dB SINAD for example. Toiling that down to just 55 dB is insulting.

As much as I hate to say it given the good looks and feeling of the NAD T758 V3, I cannot recommend it.

------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

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@amirm Thanks for another detailed and thourough review; very enlightening given the brand and price point concerned.

I've just been wondering, what the power output via the headphone jack is for these units. Many AVs and Integrated amps have them, and I was wondering what the power output and output impedance is. For example, I've been using my Sony F470 integrated amp (110 W x 2 @ 4 ohm) to drive my headphones and my DX3 Pro as a digital receiver / AUX to the amp, but the user and service manuals don't say anything about the headphone power output.

Anecdotally, the integrated amp seems to have much more power than the DX3, because the volume dial is at the 2/10 or 3/10 position and the volume is already super loud when listening with my HD 650s. I'm wondering how this compares to the headphone amps, and if there's a benefit in going via the integrated amp vs a headphone amp? The cool thing is that the IA also has tone control, so one can EQ the headphones (great for bringing some more low end sound from the HD 650s to hear the bass guitar and drums).

 

[AudioSceptic]

The NAD 2200 power amps were also quiet famous at their time.

I never heard that one but it had a good rep. The 3020 was what established the NAD "legend" though.