Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Hey, I own this! (I was Googling for it this morning and was surprised to see it pop up on Amazon.)
Maybe the reason the NAD M5 has gotten so little attention in the U.S. is that it just doesn't have the right combination of features for this market. The "failure" of SACD on these shores has been widely trumpeted in the audio and home theatre press -- never mind that it's doing very well with classical boutique labels and a significant number of audiophiles. Personally, I love the sound of good SACD recordings, especially multichannel releases. There's a fullness and depth, not to mention the sound of the hall, that you just don't get otherwise. But a lot of recent high-end SACD players are stereo-only, apparently because that's what a diehard two-channel enthusiast is more likely to purchase. Everyone else gets the cheapest "universal" player they can find.
So here's this honey of a player, virtually ignored by North America and underpromoted by NAD itself. Folks, it's a great machine. I have had mine for a year and a half. It plays three formats extremely well: CD, SACD (both stereo and multichannel), and HDCD. Built like a tank. Easy to set up, with digital bass management and distance compensation available for SACD. Looks nice. Reasonably priced. You should get one!
The CD sound was, for me, the biggest shock. What this baby pulls off a Redbook (i.e., standard) disc is just astonishing. Probably the extremely fine 24-bit/192 kHz digital-to-analog converters, plus the care they take with power supply, circuitry, etc. Now I actually enjoy listening to CDs again; much of the harshness has been scrubbed away, replaced by realism, dynamics, impact, beautiful true tone.
I had been playing SACDs with a Marantz SA8260, which may have had a slightly more luscious (i.e., warm-colored?) tone quality, but lacked the dynamics of this unit -- plus no bass management, and mediocre CD reproduction. So I am very happy now. Am playing the CDs through the balanced (XLR) outputs to my Anthem AVM20, w/ Parasound Halo A51 power amp and Von Schweikert VR-4jr, LCR-15 speakers. (I'm just throwing this in so you will have some idea of how this integrates in a nice but affordable system.)
Check the NAD Website for more information. Highly recommended.
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Product Description:
Many of us still have extensive CD collections, however, and luckily the M5 has sophisticated circuitry designed to also get the best possible sound quality from your existing CD recordings. In addition, the M5 includes an HDCD decoder which can increase the dynamic range of CD by 6dB with specially encoded and widely available CDs. CDR and CDRW recordable discs are fully supported, and even MP3 and WMA can be played on the M5 CD/SACD Player offering many hours of playback from a single disc.But the SACD format also offers the possibility of 5.1 surround sound playback, and the M5 is equipped to take full advantage of these exciting new multi-channel recordings. We have even included comprehensive bass management (redirection) for the 5.1 output.Several popular speaker configurations can be easily accessed from the front panel controls and navigated via the VFD display. A higher level of fine tuning is available via the Composite Video output using the M5's On Screen Display. This video output is also useful for managing MP3 playback. Since we expect most M5's to be used in music only systems, the video circuit can be switched off to afford the cleanest possible audio performance.
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