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Review and Measurements of NAD T777 AVR

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amirm

amirm

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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?
Presumptuous? You are underestimating the collective power and influence of this forum. People search online for information before buying:

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And we will likely keep moving up in rankings as we test more home theater components. Notice how AVS Forum is not even on that page. We are not just a forum. We are an information center anchored solidly by the review and testing.

We won't get there overnight but we are making waves. Don't make any mistakes about that...
 

vert

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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 ;)
Same here, not saying it wouldn't be better with a center speaker, but dialogue is perfectly clear and balanced with a 2.1 setup...
 

Vovgan

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we will likely keep moving up in rankings as we test more home theater components.

For me it’s up at number two in search results:
 

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audimus

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Another way, a “clean revolution” can happen is the way it happened with Hypex nCore development. Someone starts to manufacture easy to integrate boards for DACs, I/O, DSP, etc., that established brands can use as they are doing with the Class D amp boards from Hypex. If such a company happened to do a very clean measuring design, and the design cost was amortized over multiple brands and the company took care of evolving technology, it could be a lot more attractive for brands like NAD to focus on just integration and outer UI features and aesthetic design. Then that spec would become the standard to chase for other companies not using those boards for competitive reasons.

Brands like Monoprice, Amazon, would then start carrying their own branded affordable nicely spec’d and measuring units, not because they were looking for clean specs but the integration model suited their business model and they have the ability to push these units at a lower price that all the other companies would have to compete with, not just the high end.

In other words, evolution that helps the business models that the manufacturers have and increases their top-line rather than an effort that will increase their costs is much more likely to succeed. I am sure most people who have worked in companies know the difference between units that are profit centers vs units that are cost centers and who get to decide what. :)
 
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mvil

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Can "we" get our hands to a THX certified (select or ultra) receiver just to see if all the tests they say they do actually represent anything?

Reference Output Voltage
Voltage Gain
Output Current
Output Source Impedance
Overload Restoring Time
Stability with Capacitive Load
Harmonic Distortion and Noise
Modulation Distortion
Difference-Frequency Distortion
Noise Output Voltage
Phase Response
D.C. Offset at the Output
Hum
Crosstalk
Acoustic Noise Level
Mechanical Noise
Input Sensitivity
Input Impedance
Output Impedance
Load Impedance Range
Voltage Output Capability
Current Output Capability
Transient Output Capability
Transient Overload Recovery Time
Asymmetrical Clipping
Frequency Response
Phase Response
Phase Margin
Time
Total Harmonic Distortion
Intermodulation Distortions
SMPTE IM Distortion
IHF IM Distortion
DIM 30 Distortion
Noise
Hum
Radiated Interference
Conducted Interference
Crosstalk
 
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Sal1950

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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.
If you really want a single number to express a "level of audibility", yea that 72 number might be close enough though there really isn't any one number. But I haven't read a comment made here since that I would disagree with. The main issue being that in this day of Our Lord 2019 we have a right to expect better from electronics and it's a good thing to encourage them to do the best they can. Just realize that if you currently own a component that isn't "in the green", that's no reason to start imagaing that it sounds like crap and throw it in the garbage. Expectation bias works both ways, don't let it spoil your enjoyment today, but reward those who do better next time around.
 

SimpleTheater

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Can "we" get our hands to a THX certified (select or ultra) receiver just to see if all the tests they say they do actually represent anything?
When it comes to modern day AVR’s, it seems that only Onkyo/Integra care about THX certification. Denon goes so far to explain why they no longer bother getting THX certified “Most A/V receivers over £500 meet or exceed the requirements of the Select or Ultra-norm by far. Equivalent circuits for THX Re-Equilization (Cinema EQ), Bass Management and Timbre Matching (Room EQ).
Since it makes little sense from our point of view to invest in this at addittional cost we decided to forego this certification.”

So it appears we are testing AVR’s that are THX quality.
 

milosz

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Most people who buy home theater receivers will be watching a lot of cable or satellite TV, which uses Dolby AC-3 which is a lossy compression scheme. Most DVDs also rely on lossy audio tracks like AC-3, DTS, or DTS HD. Yes, SOME DVDs have lossless audio, and more Blu-Ray films and 4k Blu-Ray films tend to have lossless audio; I can't determine if Dolby Atmos or DTS:X are inherently lossless as it seems they can be "folded into" other encoding schemes to be decoded and their object-based sound schemes to be added to an underlying soundtrack like Dolby TrueHD (which IS lossless) but there is nothing to say that Atmos object schemes can't also be used with lower-bitrate lossy formats; so it seems an Atmos soundtrack and playback is no guarantee of lossless quality.

From this I conclude the great majority of users - even of fairly high-end home theater pre-pros - will be watching / listening to lossy formats most of the time. So do we really need 20-bit linearity and top-quartile SINAD for playback of these lossy soundtracks?

Now, of course, there is also multichannel music and so on, and for people who want a system fully capable of playing music in the round, well, we probably want desktop-level DAC performance for such systems. How many people have high-end dedicated multichannel music playback systems? I'd be surprised if that number were over 1,000 in the US.

So it's no wonder that the manufacturers of home theater units do not invest in high-end type D/A facilities. It would largely be a waste for the bulk of uses that such gear is put to: lossy soundtracks.

I think one needs a dedicated high quality two channel music system for MUSIC, to which can be added a pre-pro for TV/BluRay, with the attendant extra amps and rear speakers so you can hear the surround gimmickry that is employed in TV DVD Blu-Ray and "App-based video." But I wouldn't expect the pre-pro to sound as good as my 2-channel "music dac."
 

mvil

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When it comes to modern day AVR’s, it seems that only Onkyo/Integra care about THX certification. Denon goes so far to explain why they no longer bother getting THX certified “Most A/V receivers over £500 meet or exceed the requirements of the Select or Ultra-norm by far. Equivalent circuits for THX Re-Equilization (Cinema EQ), Bass Management and Timbre Matching (Room EQ).
Since it makes little sense from our point of view to invest in this at addittional cost we decided to forego this certification.”

So it appears we are testing AVR’s that are THX quality.

Well if we were going to belive manufacturers we wouldn't need ASR
 

peng

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Thanks for another review Amir!
Based on this and all previous AVR measurements now I'm even more interested to see the measurements of an integrated stereo amplifiers', how their amp and analog path sections will differ from AVRs...

Agreed, but should measure the A-S801 just to compare with its related AVRs. I can almost guarantee it won't measure much different than the RX-A1080 due to the same kind of ICs used, except the USB DAC input that may perform much better. It really depends on the individual two channel amps, though separate preamp/amp at high price range should obviously always measure better than AVRs. Integrated amps, well then it depends..
 

Tks

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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.

Just want to say firstly, more times than not in places I have been been from Reddit to Drop to SBAF etc.. whenever I give a hint of objectivist leanings, or start talking about technical specification metrics I instantly get called out, or have someone bring to my attention Amir, or this place (sometimes in a positive agreement, but usually with scorn like "do you listen to your gear or his measurements" and stuff like that.

So to say no one knows of this place is ridiculous. Now if you want to say HiFi in general is niche, then that's fine. But in the scope of audio this place is definitely not some unknown back-alley anymore.

Second, you say "not going to be influenced by specs...unless its Dirac" (I paraphrase). That's like saying "You can't ever have an effect on me, except when you do have an effect on me - when you did this one thing to effect me". That simply doesn't make sense. Measurements are obvious to the engineers, and measurement devices, and like every other industry (for the most part) rely on such metrics to put out products on the market that stand up to objective rigor so no one can bitch later on about something being done at the fault of carelessness or laziness. That Dirac you spoke of, that's only possible by measurements. No reason to just stop with that... If these idiotic boutique companies cared to survive and prosper they would fight on all realms (looks, build quality, provenance, and even technical specification checklists). But for some reason in audio there seems to be a massive number of deluded and ignorant people with respect basic logic fundamentals.

These companies don't chase performance metrics because they are unable (like every other electronic industry that uses refrence designs and OEM designs to actually make their products), they do it because they've done well ignoring that and just putting out same old, tired nonsense, over and over. There is no reason on this planet a company like NAD couldn't do what Topping did at least for the DAC portion of their devices. Literally just leach off of AKM or ESS DAC chips to do the heavy lifting, and just focus on power delivery otherwise. Now I get 16 channels is a whole other beast, but when the device is told to do 2 channels, measurements like this - for the price - are a laughing stock, a mockery to their customers, and a mockery of themselves for their pathetically earned reputation as a "serious brand".

EDIT: Typos from mobile corrections.
 
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GrimSurfer

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These companies don't chases performance metrics because they are unable (like every other electronic industry that uses refrence designs and OEM designs to actually make their products), they do it because they've done well ignoring that and just putting out same old, tired nonsense, over and over.

^^ This^^
 

audimus

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So to say no one knows of this place is ridiculous.
When people have to put up strawmen to shoot at, the argument is weak and a fallacy. Who said the above?
Second, you say "not going to be influenced by specs...unless its Dirac" (I paraphrase). That's like saying "You can't ever have an effect on me, except when you do have an effect on me - when you did this one thing to effect me". That simply doesn't make sense.
You should stop paraphrasing and use actual quotes so as not to put up strawmen to shoot at.
The point was that people won’t care about some spec improvement unless the effect of that improvement aurally is as obvious as that of using a room correction. Find anyone here that will say improving the spec from the bottom of the SINAD table to the top will have an obvious aural improvement to the consumer.
Measurements are obvious to the engineers, and measurement devices, and like every other industry (for the most part) rely on such metrics to put out products on the market that stand up to objective rigor so no one can bitch later on about something being done at the fault of carelessness or laziness. That Dirac you spoke of, that's only possible by measurements. No reason to just stop with that... If these idiotic boutique companies cared to survive and prosper they would fight on all realms (looks, build quality, provenance, and even technical specification checklists). But for some reason in audio there seems to be a massive number of deluded and ignorant people with respect basic logic fundamentals.
Ironic, you call massive number of people deluded and ignorant with respect to basic logic fundamentals using more fallacious logic than I haver seen in a single post. In addition to strawman arguments above that are fallacious, the argument above is illogical.

First, it makes a case that measurements are important that no one argued against (strawman). Second, it uses a non sequitor argument. Dirac is possible only with measurement and therefore any measurement is useful. Not sure you should be calling large groups illogical. That is just self-unaware arrogance.

These companies don't chase performance metrics because they are unable (like every other electronic industry that uses refrence designs and OEM designs to actually make their products),
I think you meant to say, “not because they are unable” which no one claimed to be so technically. Note that the point is whether there is more than diminishing returns on doing so in that investment. So the rest of the argument is moot as well.

Less bile on manufacturers and their customer base and a more logical argument would be more persuasive.
 
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amirm

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The point was that people won’t care about some spec improvement unless the effect of that improvement aurally is as obvious as that of using a room correction.
That's not true. A DAC that won't decode beyond 44.1 kHz will not sell as well as one that goes to 384 kHz, DSD, etc. None of that makes an audible improvement like room eq. Specs and measurements do sell.
 

GrimSurfer

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That's not true. A DAC that won't decode beyond 44.1 kHz will not sell as well as one that goes to 384 kHz, DSD, etc. None of that makes an audible improvement like room eq. Specs and measurements do sell.

Another issue is whether the product meets its advertised spec. Products that don't reflect a dishonest manufacturer. Nobody wants to buy stuff from a dishonest manufacturer.
 
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amirm

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Less bile on manufacturers and their customer base and a more logical argument would be more persuasive.
Come again? We have desktop DACs that strive for great performance. Some now actually post Audio Precision snapshots. That is partly because we measure the same and therefore marketing value is created. The same can and will likely happen with AVRs and home theater processors in the higher-end of the market. And eventually even in the more bargain pricing. To say no is to deny the effect we have already had.

You can be part of this movement by not trying to be negative about it and make sure others know about the data we are producing. Once there, the message will get back to manufacturers and improvements will occur.
 

Timbo2

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I think one needs a dedicated high quality two channel music system for MUSIC, to which can be added a pre-pro for TV/BluRay, with the attendant extra amps and rear speakers so you can hear the surround gimmickry that is employed in TV DVD Blu-Ray and "App-based video." But I wouldn't expect the pre-pro to sound as good as my 2-channel "music dac."

Some of us have neither the room nor resources for such a setup. For $2,7000 it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a device to be competent if not brilliant at both functions.
 

Willem

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And all the more since some $2000 will buy you absolutely state of the art 2 channel electronics that cannot be impiorved upon (RME ADI-2 DAC and a Ncore power amp).
 

audimus

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That's not true. A DAC that won't decode beyond 44.1 kHz will not sell as well as one that goes to 384 kHz, DSD, etc. None of that makes an audible improvement like room eq. Specs and measurements do sell.

You need to stop generalizing from the audiophile DAC niche. Because it self selects for people who are looking for that as the major differentiator. Even in mass market, people look at specs whether it makes a difference or not. In AVRs, one spec almost everyone looks at is amp power rating even if it does not make a difference to anything they use it for.

But you are making the same logical fallacy of assuming that because of it, any measurement we do will be relevant and important.

Consider a parody for the arguments so far:

ASR: This SUV measured near the bottom of the rankings for CoD that we measure. It is worse than that of the Ducati we have measured before that costs a tenth as much. Why can’t they make SUVs that measure as well?
ASR mob: Manufacturers are evil, greedy scum. They only care about the bottom line. They can easily build cars with better CoD specs but they will not because the consumers are easily duped and ignorant.
Me: For the target segment that buy SUVs, the return on investment is not as good in improving something that makes a tangible difference like driver-assist rather than a metric that at best goes into the rounding error of fuel efficiency ratings. They are not buying these on CoD specs.
You: Of course people buy on specs. Look at people that buy motorbikes for auto-crossing. A motorbike with a high CoD will not sell as well. And they do this even if there is no impact on their track timings. So people will buy on specs and we are going to become more and more popular and force all SUV manufacturers to have better CoD specs. See here are the google search results for reviews on a SUV which shows we are gaining in influence.
Me: :facepalm:
You: If you stop being negative and help promote CoD ratings, we will become relevant for creating market value and so the manufacturers will follow where even the budget cars will have as good a CoD spec as the Ducatis.
Me: :rolleyes:

But seriously, do not take criticism for what is in my opinion, an impractical approach, as negativism. You can disagree with it, of course. In science, criticism of a methodology or an inference is not negativism, it is the norm as long as it is logical. If it is just based on activism, then it is a religion and you should change the name of the site from ASR to House of SINAD. :D

I have given more constructive suggestions than most for how the measurements can be improved to make it more relevant to consumers (not just tech-nerds). I have also pointed out how the ratings here can mislead and why that may make their relevance in the outside world doubtful. There is too much group-think going on here on what these measurements mean.

A better approach is not discarding the measurement but rather how you present and infer from them. For example,

1. Stop rating every device out there in a single SINAD table with arbitrary buckets that have no logical or tangible explanation as to why they are so divided.
2. For AVRs, create a separate table based on quality of audio it is capable of handling with categories of CD quality, DVD quality, Studio Quality, Hi Res, etc based on the measurement. There may be a technical explanation of what those categories mean somewhere but those labels are much more tangible and meaningful to population outside this echo chamber than bits and khz. It will also be something that the manufacturer marketing people will understand better than dB numbers as relevant to their segment.
etc.

In short, stop thinking like a technical manager and more like an outward facing product manager to make the “product” of this site more relevant and the work worthwhile to change the industry.

If that view is considered negative, so be it.
 
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