NAD, your T747 is a disaster.
Look, NAD, I love you. You introduced me to Hi-Fi at precisely the right age with your lovely little 3020i integrated amp, and I've been a loyal cheerleader for your real world approach to power ratings and your "sound first" circuit design with selectable bypasses at every point that could potentially muddy the sound. Your amps sound remarkable for the price. Just gorgeous, so weighty, and so listenable. Unflappable. Soft clipping is something you should license out.

But your T747 is a real hunk of shit.

Allow me to put forward my grievances here. The amp sounds great. It really does. It sounds fantastic. The amp section is phenomenal for the price. Audiophile grade. But this is an A/V receiver, and the digital processing part of the thing is just about the worst thought-out pile of standards-avoiding nonsense I've yet encountered.

Firstly, video upscaling is a handy thing in an AVR. Your choice of a Faroudja chip is commendable, but all my video sources put out 1080p and my TV's scaler is pretty good, so why can I not bypass it? AVR upscaling adds lag, and lag is something that does not sit well with someone who plays a lot of games with his home theatre.

To crown the irritation, not only does the upscaler decrease the quality of the 1080p video it's fed, it can't seem to believe that because I reside outside the USA, I have any need for a 60Hz frame rate. So it completely judders through all the 24Hz and 60Hz video I have (that's nearly all my video, because I watch Blu-ray) at 50Hz. No, the auto-frame-rate-selection feature doesn't work at all.

So I bypassed this idiocy by purchasing (at some expense) an HDMI splitter and source selector for all my HDMI devices (a lot) that sends the video to the TV and the audio to the AVR. Problem sort of solved, although my collection of behind-the-rack-power strips is starting to creak at the strain of the wall-warts for all the active devices I'm amassing.

Secondly, your choice of DAC certainly isn't the worst in terms of sound quality, but why in Satan's name is it unable to lock onto a silent stream within or for more than two seconds? Every time I fire up an album on CD or my SqueezeBox Touch, I have to habitually press pause and then skip back to the beginning to hear the opening notes. Don't tell me about jitter or PLL or anything, because I had a bottom rung Sony HTiB that managed apparently instantaneous lock onto S/PDIF signals and would not drop them at the hint of a row of zeroes. This is frankly, bollocks in any device that can play back PCM digital sources with a sampling rate as high as stupefying high and rare as 192kHz, and yours can. So why does it struggle to recognise 44.1kHz?

So I complained a bit, and it turns out my firmware was out of date. But naturally, the firmware is not user updateable. Car-less me had to take my enormous hunk of metal to the nearest licensed NAD service agent (MILES away). Which fixed nothing.

Not even the "preset" mode which is supposed to select, based on the source, the right DSP algorithm (I only want Dolby Pro Logic II applied to my TV's sound). I have to select it manually every time.

But it does sound very good, and when your improved-in-every-way, modular, upgradeable T757 reaches the same clearance pricepoint I got this poor, confused device at, then I will likely sell it and upgrade.
(Ladyfingers is in your wardrobe,, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 4:03, 16 replies)

I have no idea what you're on about
but the the emotion is conveyed with such élan.

Have a soothing click.
(roysin, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 4:52, closed)

Thankez Vous.
Here it is, looking classy while behaving badly.


(Ladyfingers is in your wardrobe,, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 5:31, closed)

This picture still doesn't help me understand what the hell you're on about

(wehttamman via B3ta for microwave, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 5:46, closed)

In short...
PlayStation: Hello NAD, here is some lovely audio and video for you!

NAD: Ooh, blimey! 'Ang on, guv, I'll figure it out eventually.

PlayStation: Too late! I changed my mind, here's some different stuff for you.

NAD: Ooh, 'eck.
(Ladyfingers is in your wardrobe,, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 5:49, closed)

ahhh!
3020i ! I remember the day I went into Richer Sounds in Brighton clasping a wad of notes and came out with my first proper HiFi featuring said unit.

Happy days.... Days when I had spare cash..
(SausageWarrior destination Zululand, come on boys jump in the van, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 7:39, closed)

I think it translates as
"I am not having any sex"
(ubergeekian, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 10:24, closed)

You lost me at "nad".
Is this about testicles?
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 12:39, closed)

I'm actually quite a fan of Ned's Atomic Dustbin

( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 13:08, closed)

I'm almost in the original video for kill your television except that I'm not.
True story. Well I say story. True non-story.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 16:04, closed)

Cool
I'll try and not spot you :)
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Mon 3 Oct 2011, 11:22, closed)

After reading this I'm in the Land of Nod

(square go, Sun 2 Oct 2011, 13:23, closed)

It's not really an NAD product. Maybe
I used to work for NAD as an amp designer before they were sold to the Canadians, and if they have a similar business model then it is likely you unit was not designed by NAD.

If you buy an amp or CD player you usually get a lovely sounding design product in one of their ugly grey boxes. It has been carefully tuned to have the best possible sound for (relatively) beer money.

However, their av processors are huge design projects. One model could take 3 man years or more to design (usually more). So the job was farmed out to Chinese design houses such as Gold Peak. The trouble there is that these people know f'all about sound quality, or quality in general. NAD then has a tweak with the circuitry to give it a family sound, and usually to stop it humming like a hive of angry bees, and then flog it. A major problem is that the engineers who designed it don't earn enough to afford av processors, so the first time they use one may be the one they designed, so don't understand the product as they need to to make it usable. Why the fuck would they know about 1080p sources when blue ray is not available in China? (Arcam and Harman Kardon do the same) NAD did start getting it's CD players done this way with some success. However this CD player turned out to be a stolen design from Arcam. This may be why Arcam and NAD pulled out of Gold Peak, and the R&D manager of Gold Peak is working somewhere else, flogging of Arcam and NAD circuitry as other brand names.
( jagwap, Mon 3 Oct 2011, 1:59, closed)

Wow, that's very depressing.
I love music most of all, so like music-focused products, but I also love games and movies, and you need surround for those, and musical sounding AVRs are like hens' teeth below the high end.

NAD's actual amplifier sections are so damn good at the price, I mean, really phenomenally powerful, that I was willing to endure a degree of bugginess in the HDMI handling and I really didn't need much beyond a crossover and delay for the speakers. I didn't anticipate just HOW buggy this thing would be.

The replacement, the T757 features their (previously high-end) modular construction (and the press seems to indicate a purist approach with the video), so I may audition the thing to see if it has a stable, responsive S/PDIF section. I would assume that the modular stuff is an in-house job, as it was only featured on their top-deck stuff before.

Failing that I suppose I could resort to Denon or Pioneer, but their cheaper models don't sound particularly good for music. Maybe some used separates one day. Always wanted an old Rotel power amp with the stonking great heat sinks on it.
(Ladyfingers is in your wardrobe,, Mon 3 Oct 2011, 4:33, closed)

There's a simple solution
Get an integrated or pre-power amp that has a bypass AV input (this bypasses the volume control on this input only). Then plug the left and right front channels from the av processor into that. Then you'll have an uncompromised stereo system with surround added on when required. ARCAM and Cyrus (Cyrus needs a three finger salute on power up) have this feature, along with others. Cyrus are good musical sounding products. Not as warm and cuddly as your NAD, but once you're used to it, much more rewarding.

There's a good chance NAD seeded the design with their amplifier circuits. However the devil is in the details.
( jagwap, Mon 3 Oct 2011, 6:22, closed)

I was under the impression
that more recent NAD receivers were done by ANAM?

In terms of AV receivers, I gave up on the smaller companies years ago. As you say, the requirements in terms of time, resources and licenses that go into even very humdrum receivers are too high for smaller companies to reasonably achieve. Arcam AV product sounds impressive but the web is awash with people finding problems with them. In contrast, my Yamaha has done everything asked of it. If I didn't own an entirely seperate two channel system I might care more that it sounds a bit plodding with music but I do so I don't if you know what I'm saying.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Mon 3 Oct 2011, 14:21, closed)

That's what disappointed me so much.
I went into the purchase assured that NAD had stripped the receiver down to the absolute basics. And, in a way, it is stripped down. The sad thing is that the few features that are there are just shoddily implemented.
(Ladyfingers is in your wardrobe,, Mon 3 Oct 2011, 15:10, closed)