The name of the company NAD Electronics is an acronym for New Acoustic Dimension. It was founded in 1970 in London and is currently located in Ontario, Canada. Their business concept was based on 3 main features: efficiency, value and simplicity. It is said that the creators wanted to return to the source of true sound, hidden behind knobs and fancy and expensive panels . A classic example of their offer is an integrated amplifier, where the radiator also acts as a screen between the amplifier's electronics and its power supply. It was quite cheap, but the left and right channels have their own power supply, as is often the case in very expensive designs. Optimal power supply was provided by doubled capacitors closer to the power transistors.
NAD amplifiers were not initially spartan. Chief designer Bjørn-Erik Edvardsen drew on his previous experience at Dolby Laboratoties . However, he quickly came up with his own concept, limiting the number of components to a minimum , which still works very well after many years . These solutions are most often associated with the marketing argument of "practical" 20 W power and sometimes also with the concepts of Soft Clipping and Full Disclosure . They can be summed up by saying that reducing distortion in the amplifier allows the speakers to be driven with less power , so that the music from them does not irritate the ears. The innovative function with compensation for low and high tones is less often remembered. The inspiration for the two-level loudness compensation was probably research conducted by Dolby , but NAD is concerned with acoustic dynamics, not on magnetic tape.
In the 1970s, NAD offered the Model 200 with separate bass and treble controls for each channel, which took into account different speaker placements in the room. There were also built-in electronics for Dolby B for tapes and FM transmissions . Today, this amplifier is an attractive trophy for the home of a collector of vintage hi-fi equipment, but for a music lover it is rather impractical. The half-century-old potentiometers and switches need refurbishing. The capacitors have also aged, which means that the characteristics of this amplifier are now completely different from those given in the manufacturer's specification.
This design, however, has a high-quality power supply and although the capacitors in this power amplifier no longer have the properties they once had, it will still do a good job of effectively driving passive speakers. The signal from the PC can be connected directly to the power amplifier . This effectively eliminates distortions in the preamplifier due to the large number of potentiometers and capacitors that have long since become outdated. Well-designed power supply designs with channel separation have existed for a long time, even in tube amplifiers. However, separation was not a conscious concept before. Amplifiers were created only for monophonic playback, because stereophony did not yet exist.
This also applied to the active loudspeaker Lund Ortho Acoustical Systems 1001 , created in Sweden in the late 1950s , which was used for years in the Swedish Radio studios and was colloquially called Kolbox , or a coal cart, which is more elegant than the ordinary bucket at home for bringing coal from the basement.
In the early seventies, Philips offered a series of active hi-fi speakers for stereo, which had a transistor amplifier. With them there was also complete separation of the power supply and here at the same time the standard was set for contemporary studio monitors with active crossover filters.
A few years later, the Swedish Audio Pro offer for the home appeared with ACE-Bass , an electronic solution in the power amplifier for driving low tones through a speaker in a bass -reflex enclosure . This was a response to the Motional Feedback solution that Philips had previously created for a closed enclosure . Today, there are already other technical possibilities to generate low tones with less distortion.
Active studio monitors now simply have much better power amplifiers. The British Tannoy Gold design fits best into the NAD concept . It has become an important reference point for the PC4uMusic configuration with 4 speakers. More on this topic is in the text entitled British proposals for new 4 ch surround in Windows
You can also buy the M66 for 26 thousand PLN – a preamplifier with BluOS , DAC and network functions. You still need active speakers or an expensive power amplifier to drive passive ones. In other words, it is a device that functions like a computer with an embedded system, not like a PC with an open structure, which gives a much freer possibility of updating to a higher level of quality.
PCs have enormous computational potential to process the digital signal of recorded music for optimal playback at home. It is worth reducing unnecessary functions in the computer, as Bjørn-Erik Edvardsen did in the legendary NAD designs , to eliminate interference in the processing. This is an entry into a world pioneered long ago by music lovers looking for something more than mass-produced radios and record players.
Analog connection of a PC with 4 Tannoy Gold 5 amplifiers with a total power of 800 W operating in class AB can, with their 5-inch coaxial transducers and without passive crossovers, ensure faithful music reproduction in many homes.
More demanding customers can choose models that provide 1200 W. Gold 7 has a 6 1/2-inch transducer, which is similar to APS Coax . The largest model has an 8-inch transducer.
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