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Don't mess wi' Mr Inbetween
NAD's blue marvels
By Tim Schuler
December 2001
NAD L55 DVD/CD player and L75 AV receiver. $1799 and $2199. $3998 for the combination
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| A nice pair - the NAD L55 (above) and L75 (below) combine to make a very attractive home theatre system |
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This little package caught my eye some months ago during a visit to NAD distributor Hi-Fi Marketing. So when the opportunity arose to bring the little NAD system home to play, I jumped at the chance. And my dearest was very pleased to see something less agricultural looking in the living room.
The fit and finish on both the DVD player and receiver are exemplary with even gaps around all buttons, knobs and display panels with a solid feel to all controls.
The beefy 10mm thick blue anodised front panels look great - no NAD battleship grey plastic here. One well designed remote control works both units with a flick of a switch.
The L75 receiver has a simply laid out facia, easy to understand and use, with rotary controls for balance, bass, treble and input selection. Surround modes include Dolby Digital and DTS decoding, Dolby Pro Logic, 3 channel and Hall.
A peek through the vented top made it obvious where the ample slam and attack was coming from with a couple of large caps and a comparatively big and heavy transformer.
The L55 DVD player boasts an excellent array of outputs. Video outputs are RGB via scart (useful for hooking into the European TVs), s-video and composite video. There’s coaxial and optical digital and of course two channel analogue. And unlike many DVD players, the L55 plays CDR’s.
After a quick session with some gorgeous little Swedish sub-sats on two channels from the DVD player, it was onto the big test with some difficult to drive full-range loudspeakers.
I slouched into listening mode for a few selected favourite DTS tracks. After a wee tweak up of the centre channel, the bullets on Dances With Wolves exploded and ricocheted with realistic attack and flew over my right shoulder seamlessly (always a good test this one).
A few tracks of Hell Freezes Over and the NAD combo proved the pair is not lacking in the musicality department either. Flicking the unit back to two channels had no surprises, although by no means liquid the wee receiver sounded very typically NAD. Everything was there with a little garnish of smoothness - a little rounded for me but certainly well above mainstream offerings.
As the volume went up and up, I was surprised that it didn’t show any strain, it just got to a point where it shrugged it’s shoulders and said “that all I’ve got, take it or leave it”. Frank Zappa came out in full force as did my hero Mel Torme.
Ian Andersons’ Divinities album with it’s strings and flutes sounded too rounded to be convincing but sounded surprisingly good on Hall mode, a function I’ve always found totally useless but now I can suggest that if one is into ambient, ‘Enigma style’ material, you should use it. [NAD’s Hall mode appears to be based on the old Hafler surround extraction model, rather than adding reverb to the existing signal, which may explain the good results – Editor]
The CD reproduction was more than acceptable for a DVD player. How good? Good enough to demand a good pair of interconnects for CD playback via the aux input.
In operation the L55 seemed a little fussy on even some zone 4 discs (my sample being a zone 2) but after a six digit remote hack it played everything flawlessly. Picture quality was a lot better than a lot of mass market brands, if not up there with my Toshiba.
Steely Dans’ Two Against Nature DVD made me sit up straight and watch the whole thing through. Paul Simons’ You’re the One sounded superb and must be heard in DTS as a disappointing two channel flick proved.
Overall the music videos and excellent special effects movies like The Fifth Element and Titanic were all well reproduced at all but ear bleeding levels. A more than capable DVD player given its ‘Lifestyle’ target market.
After a couple of weeks of across the board listening, I can recommend anyone (audionerds like me included) check out these high quality compact components. Pair the NAD combo with a six-piece sub/sat system from the likes of Energy, Boston, PSB and Audiopro for one hell of system.
As usual for a “lifestyle” system, the NAD has some stiff competition from more conventional separate components, offerings from it’s own stable included. But if style, build quality, compactness and sound quality for both music and movies is all on your list, then these beauties must be auditioned.
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