Review and Measurements of NAD T777 AVR

[Sal1950]

I completely agree and Atmos takes it another step further.

I was very leery on spending the money for the Atmos/DTS-X upgrade but super glad I did.
The overhead speakers not only brings greatly increased reality to certain special movie audio effects, but can be very effective in adding to the positive results of stereo upmixing. It was worth every penny and more to me.

 

[speedy]

I was very leery on spending the money for the Atmos/DTS-X upgrade but super glad I did.
The overhead speakers not only brings greatly increased reality to certain special movie audio effects, but can be very effective in adding to the positive results of stereo upmixing. It was worth every penny and more to me.

I think the most attractive thing about home theater processors isn’t that they can handle all of these speakers, but rather what they allow you to do with bass management and room correction right out of the box via DSP.

I’ve owned some really well-measuring DACs connected to excellent amps and I’d personally take a room corrected & bass managed AVP any day over a well measuring standalone DAC without any DSP.

My ears easily pick up on a well-tuned system (via DSP) whereas my ears have a really tough time telling an average DAC from a state-of-the-art DAC.

Hopefully some day we‘ll be able to have it all!

 

[carlosmante]

This confirms once again my preference for using my 2 channel audio system for watching movies. You lose the surround experience but you gain ultra clean power and the impact of much larger speakers (quad electrostats in my case) than you could realistically have in multichannel.

How do you know your 2 channel system gives you "ultra clean power" ?

 

[audimus]

- I’m a believer that excellent left/right speakers and 2 subwoofers are a min requirement for a great home theater experience... and excellent speakers don’t need to be huge. Three amazing identical bookshelf speakers across the front sound stage would be great.
- A center is key if it can nearly match/exceed the capabilities of the left/right speakers. I’ve seen so many home theaters with great left/right speakers and a tiny & poorly placed center speaker.

I agree that the 3 fronts carry the most content.

However, I would say a 3.1 is much more useful than a 2.2 (unless feeling explosions is more important than hearing dialog in what you watch!) if you had to pick assuming good room correction.

Having gone through this entire evolution in number of speakers, anything below 5.1 creates unsatisfactory results to balance dialog, ambiance, heft and screen stage. It is difficult to get all of them right. This is from the practical problem of having to downmix the channels.

Downmix is not just as simple as directing the content to other available speakers. The proportion in which you mix is critical (for balance as well as to avoid clipping). There are various formulas commonly used to downmix a center channel to mains but it is very difficult to get the dialog to be clear and in balance with the background sounds (music, off-screen sounds, etc) that are typically in the L and R. So, you can optimize for dialog or you can optimize for background but not both. In most AVRs, downmixing to 2.1 typically results in people complaining that they cannot hear the dialog well or it is too low.

Mixing surrounds into the fronts, of course, totally destroys the spatial feel. Even crappy $40 Walmart speakers for surrounds is better than not having them.

 

[speedy]

I agree that the 3 fronts carry the most content. However, I would say a 3.1 is much more useful than a 2.2 (unless feeling explosions is more important than hearing dialog in what you watch!) if you had to pick assuming good room correction.

I've never been able to place single sub in a room and get completely flat bass response. Every room I've ever setup has needed multiple subs to get flat/even bass response. For me, multiple subs isn't about louder bass, it's about flat bass response that blends well with the main speakers... very important for music.

 

[audimus]

I've never been able to place single sub in a room and get completely flat bass response. Every room I've ever setup has needed multiple subs to get flat/even bass response. For me, multiple subs isn't about louder bass, it's about flat bass response that blends well with the main speakers... very important for music.

I won’t disagree for music since you don’t need the C.

We were talking about HT not just music, right? Just saying you can live with some room corrected but non-optimal bass response with a single but a good subwoofer than compromise the dialog with downmixing center regardless of how good main speakers you have. If you had to choose between them, of course.

I didn’t say two SWs were louder and was necessary for HT for that reason. HT experience for movies with plenty LFE content is also at its best when you can feel the rumble in your chest. You can get that with an impractically large single subwoofer or with two practically sized ones placed well.

I would rate the HT configuration usefulness as 2.0 < 2.1 < 3.1 < 5.1 < 5.2/7.1 < 7.2 < 7.x.x with diminishing marginal returns.

 

[Sal1950]

My ears easily pick up on a well-tuned system (via DSP) whereas my ears have a really though time telling an average DAC from a state-of-the-art DAC.

That my friend is the the whole truth in a nutshell.
As another friend just said to me, With a SINAD above about 72 most people would never hear any difference between them.

 

[speedy]

I won’t disagree for music since you don’t need the C.

We were talking about HT not just music, right? Just saying you can live with some room corrected but non-optimal bass response with a single but a good subwoofer than compromise the dialog with downmixing center regardless of how good main speakers you have. If you had to choose between them, of course.

I didn’t say two SWs were louder and was necessary for HT for that reason. HT experience for movies with plenty LFE content is also at its best when you can feel the rumble in your chest. You can get that with an impractically large single subwoofer or with two practically sized ones placed well.

I would rate the HT configuration usefulness as 2.0 < 2.1 < 3.1 < 5.1 < 5.2/7.1 < 7.2 < 7.x.x with diminishing marginal returns.

Yeah, but I think we can both agree that the same essential ingredients will result in both Music & Home Theater sounding good.

My own experience has been that...
- I have no issues with dialogue intelligibility when using just 2 really good and properly DSP'd front speakers.
- I've heard many center channels that produce dialogue of lesser quality than the dialogue mentioned in my previous statement.
- I have never been able to get flat bass response without at least 2 subs.

Because of my experiences, that's why I'd always recommend starting with a 2.2 setup... it can sound amazing for both music and movies, the dual subs can make your left/right channels sound significantly better, and can serve as the foundation for an eventual 5.2+ surround system.

We're both entitled to our opinions on the importance of starting with a center channel vs a second sub

 

[SimpleTheater]

I was very leery on spending the money for the Atmos/DTS-X upgrade but super glad I did.
The overhead speakers not only brings greatly increased reality to certain special movie audio effects, but can be very effective in adding to the positive results of stereo upmixing. It was worth every penny and more to me.

After watching Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in DTS 7.1, with Yamaha’s “fake overhead channel setting”, I was blown away by the fountain scene. Throughout the movie the ceiling speakers were unnoticeable, but when the birds were flying overhead everyone watching were literally transported to the director’s world. My next upgrade will be adding two more overhead speakers for a total of six ceiling channels.

 

[hangcheng]

waiting for the dx7 pro review....

 

[raif71]

That my friend is the the whole truth in a nutshell.
As another friend just said to me, With a SINAD above about 72 most people would never hear any difference between them.

So, even though we see many SINAD values from the many reviews here, any device that has the value above "72" would be good enough audibly? Just want to confirm what is meant by you coz from the SINAD bar graph here, anything below 85 is in the red zone.

 

[raif71]

He is on strike due to lack of pay relative to amount of work he has done in previous reviews....

I seem to remember someone saying this "Ultimately though, I am not sure it makes a lot of logical sense. But it is making emotional sense....."

 

[speedy]

So, even though we see many SINAD values from the many reviews here, any device that has the value above "72" would be good enough audibly? Just want to confirm what is meant by you coz from the SINAD bar graph here, anything below 85 is in the red zone.

I think it's way more complicated than that...
A lot of people can't tell the difference, but some people can.
Some people that think they can tell a difference actually can't.
There are many factors that contribute what kind of "good" or "bad" sound signature a device will have that are related to SINAD.
Equipment combinations come into play (weakest link and such).
Hearing loss comes into play.
Room and environment affect any system.
etc, etc.
If you get to listen to enough equipment though in your home side-by-side which many people can't do for a variety of reasons, you'll find yourself trying to figure out what/why things sound different and that's often not easily explained.
With that said, it's technically impossible for devices with excellent measurements to sound bad and that's why measurements are important. Good measurements take the guesswork out of typical A/V snake-oil shopping and hopefully hold manufacturers to a higher standard.

 

[digicidal]

I think a large factor as well comes in the form of age - and by that I don't mean hearing loss. Human brains are very strange in that sense... for the most part we have absolutely horrible memories - even when people are confident... it's virtually guaranteed to be wrong. We make shit up all the time... but most of all, we have a "revision-stack" that we update and over-write constantly. Although this applies to every area, it has some distinct advantages (and disadvantages) in sensory perception, I think. The more familiar you are with an experience, the more critical you are of outliers - and the more relatable to similarities. Part of the reason why double-blind comparisons are so important.

So if you're old enough to remember listening to LPs on a all-in-one Panasonic like me almost anything current sounds fantastic! Even despite the fact that I have no reliable memory of how it actually sounded! On the other hand, if the worst sounding system you've regularly used is a DAP (particularly if high-bitrate lossy or lossless files were used) - you definitely might find it lacking. Although more likely you'd just find it "uninspiring" - since it's not really that bad.

I am pleased to see that at least those customers forking over the extra cash for the premium AVR are getting a broad improvement over the cheaper model - just not necessarily over a different brand's offering at the same price. On the design side I think available space does have something to do with it - but I think it has even more to do with the truth that formats alone will guarantee obsolescence of AVRs. Why spend the extra time, energy, and expense designing something to last 20 years when it will most likely get tossed in favor of a new one once DTS-SuperGreat XPS II or Dolby Biosphere Ultra is released?

 

[Dogen]

Another disappointing showing from a respected brand.

I have a question that maybe those more intimate with the industry can answer. What is the root cause of the generally poor performance of AVRs? I understand that cost of manufacture is an issue. But is it parts cost, or companies skimping on the design phase? Seems most of the issues we see stem not from poor parts selection, but bad design.

With a little more attention to implementation, could an AVR with basically the same parts and manufacture cost perform significant better?

 

[audimus]

With that said, it's technically impossible for devices with excellent measurements to sound bad and that's why measurements are important.

Measurements are important to verify stated specs with actual results as measured and to make relative comparisons of engineering effort. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is no scientific basis for saying one value is excellent while another isn’t. These are quite arbitrary tagged buckets like relative grading on a curve. This is why the SINAD table misleads.

Yes, you can say one measures better than the other. But the original question was one of absolute grading. Is there a minimum value of SINAD over which I won’t hear anything bad. There are a lot of conjectures and over-provisioning (or overly-conservative) guesses.

Even the above assumes, that the SINAD rating is necessarily positively correlated with sound quality as heard. That the audibility degrades as you go down throughout the value range of measured devices. While this may very well be true, there is no scientific basis (yet) for assuming that is necessarily true, and as such, there is no scientific basis for claiming a minimum threshold as an answer other than as a finger in the wind conjecture.

 

[audimus]

With a little more attention to implementation, could an AVR with basically the same parts and manufacture cost perform significant better?

The key words are little more and significantly better. I don’t think any of these companies are intentionally holding back if they could do that.

It could very well be a point of diminishing returns. Is the effort required to go 10dB cleaner commensurate with the returns in higher pricing or larger sales? The tech-nerds here will jump up and down and scream yes. But tech-nerds are very poor at understanding the real world markets.

I posted the tech specs of an AVR from the mid-2000s that was better than any of these measurements and more or less measured as published in reviews at the time. But the unit was a commercial flop and the company with similar engineering effort across their product line could not thrive. The reason was it fell into a target segment between the mass market that was much cheaper and a much more expensive high-end market that got all the hyped golden-ear magazine reviews that the affluent followed who dismissed these units as good but lacking in X, Y and Z compared to the ones costing 10 times as much (quite possibly the hearing influenced by the price). So, unless this company spent zillions of dollars in advertising, it could not attract a big enough market or get shelf space with dealers. And it is a death spiral when you get into that situation.

NAD was one such company. So, they pivoted to being a marketing-led company where the exterior design, reliance on third party modules, tiered pricing and other market optimization methods define the company today. Licensing Dirac gives a better return on investment than making their DACs cleaner, I am sure. Something, a wider market segment appreciates. I am not even sure they have as much of the skilled engineers, QA, etc., as they used to have.

 

[amirm]

It could very well be a point of diminishing returns. Is the effort required to go 10dB cleaner commensurate with the returns in higher pricing or larger sales?

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.

 

[audimus]

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.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Measurements are important to verify stated specs with actual results as measured and to make relative comparisons of engineering effort. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is no scientific basis for saying one value is excellent while another isn’t. These are quite arbitrary tagged buckets like relative grading on a curve. This is why the SINAD table misleads.

Yes, you can say one measures better than the other. But the original question was one of absolute grading. Is there a minimum value of SINAD over which I won’t hear anything bad. There are a lot of conjectures and over-provisioning (or overly-conservative) guesses.

Even the above assumes, that the SINAD rating is necessarily positively correlated with sound quality as heard. That the audibility degrades as you go down throughout the value range of measured devices. While this may very well be true, there is no scientific basis (yet) for assuming that is necessarily true, and as such, there is no scientific basis for claiming a minimum threshold as an answer other than as a finger in the wind conjecture.

Okay lets put a finger in the wind and do some conjecture.

Pretty much any halfway serious okay speaker will manage about .3% distortion at 95 db. Yeah, there is worse and yeah there is better. I'd say you want any other distortion contributors to be 20 db lower than this so as not to significantly contribute to distortion. .3% THD is -50 db. So your electronics shouldn't contribute more than -70 db. It is just too pitiful otherwise. Your speaker is your bottleneck and if it isn't your electronics suck real bad. I've not found any natural recordings with an SNR greater than the mid 60 db range. So not a bad starting point.

Even with test signals humans don't seem to hear basic distortion if it is below -60 db. Probably higher with music. Still just general principal if your transducers aren't the bottleneck you should be ashamed of your electronics. So if quiescent noise is low enough not to be heard with your speakers, response is flat (I mean like really flat, we can hear this even with music if there is much deviation at all), are distortion numbers of -70 db enough to sound as good as anything better? With movies and with music.

Now a fair number of the AVR gear trends close to this amps and all considered. I'd like a little margin of error. Anecdotal experience with a pre/pro I found unsatisfactory with high level scenes in movies and high level music was later measured to be distorting peaks at 3% or so, and with many harmonics at -50 db of the main signal. It sounded shrill and ear piercing. A different input sounded fine and measured with THD around the mid 80 db range and only lower harmonics. So I've reason to think mid 80's might be fine, and 50 isn't good enough at least on peaks.

So finger in the wind, any AV pre/pro or AVR that can't break past 80 db is garbage and should be ranked in a trash can bin of the SINAD chart. We might find some minor differences past keeping SINAD even lower than 80 db, but come on, with modern capabilities anyone not managing at least 80 db isn't really trying. Maybe excusable if it is super budget gear. Not acceptable past $500. Maybe the metric should be cost per channel. Not acceptable past $100 per channel (and that is being damned generous).