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NAD T550, £500
COPY
The arrival of
the first DVD player from NAD has generated a small frisson of excitement
amongst the hi-fi cognoscenti. NAD audio components have a well-earned
reputation for performance and distinctive styling and the latter is clearly
evident on the T550, which shares a number of cosmetic features with its audio
stablemates. Sadly though the designers have seen fit to spoil the attractive
minimalist lines by filling the empty area on the front panel next to the
display and disc tray with a motley collection of logos, but apart from that
it’s an object lesson on how to make a plain black box (well, dark charcoal
grey…) look quite interesting.
The feature
list is somewhat brief for a player costing the thick end of £500 but it does
have a built-in Dolby Digital decoder and the marketing guff points out that
NAD’s hi-fi expertise has been bought to bear on the design, claiming it is
equally adept at audio CDs and 5.1 soundtracks. Audio features of note include
high grade components in key processing circuits and a Burr-Brown 1716 digital
to audio converter (DAC), which is normally only to be found in top of the
range CD players. That’s as maybe, but the fact remains that the audio options
are surprisingly limited, it lacks the customary channel level adjustment
controls and test tone generator, in fact the only thing you can do is switch
the centre, surround and sub woofer channels on and off. This presumes a lot of
the amplifier to which it is connected but there is a clear understanding that
would-be T550 owners will already be confirmed NAD fans and will buy it to
partner its AV amp/receivers or use it with other equally well-bred audio
components.
The video side
of things is also rather sparse, it has a 2-stage picture zoom and a set of
multi-speed replay modes but they’re nothing to get excited about. The
four-stage slomo is okay but fast picture search is distinctly odd. The first
‘search’ speed appears to run the disc at normal speed but it drops a few frames
every second or so and consequently it hardly does anything at all. The faster
search speeds are all very jerky and not much use for finding your way around a
recording. There are no picture equalisation controls, and this shifts all of
the adjustments away from the player to the TV. That would be okay if the
picture didn’t need adjusting…but more about that in moment.
In playback
mode a simple on-screen display shows disc information and provides access to
basic control settings (sound and subtitle language etc.), it has a more or
less standard set of sockets on the back panel with an RGB output available on
the single SCART socket and separate composite and S-Video outputs.
Surprisingly for a player with such esteemed hi-fi credentials there is no front-panel
headphone socket though to be fair it doesn’t fit then on its CD players
either. The remote control handset? Well, that’s just plain nasty and you can
read all about it below.
And so we come
to the picture. It’s a bit average and images on our sample had a tendency to
look dark and sombre; it’s the sort of picture that manages to make bright
sunny days look as though they were shot at dusk. It is possible to compensate
for the worst of it, using the picture controls on the TV, but you’ll have to
tweak them again when you change channel or switch source components. Even so
the contrast balance is a touch on the heavy side and no amount of twiddling
with the TVs contrast can do much to lighten and reveal detail lost in shadows
and dark scenes. Resolution is satisfactory and the processing is generally
clean and free of any artefacts but it’s not so hot at rendering shades subtle
colour changes. Layer change is slow taking a full second on some discs.
NAD’s claims to
audio excellence are generally well founded and we suspect that even dyed in
the wool hi-fi buffs will find little to complain about when the T550 is used
as an audio source component. The sound is sharp and punchy with a very solid
bass. The 5.1 channels produce a clean and very well focused soundfield, full
of movement and able to swing effortlessly from quiet background sounds to big
heavy-duty effects. Once again there’s a plenty of room for bass frequencies,
which may not suit some musical tastes but it is well suited to movie soundtracks.
It is clear
that NAD has taken a slightly different route to other most manufacturers by
effectively going it alone and designing its DVD player from the ground up,
rather than going down the badge-engineering route or assembling a player from
predominantly off the shelf components. To some extent it has paid off and the
T550 is one of a small handful of DVD players that can lay claim to being
serious hi-fi quality audio CD players. However, video performance is not on
quite the same level and the lack of picture controls seems a bit shortsighted.
Audio buffs and NAD fans will welcome the T550 but we feel that for home cinema
applications there are better players to be had for £500, or less.
Contact Nad 01296 482017
BOX COPY 1 –
REMOTE VIEWING
Either the
person who designed this button-box has unusually long fingers, or used the
eeny-meeny… method of control placement. Pause Stop and Play along the top row
is fair enough, but what are the slomo, scan and skip rockers doing on their
sides halfway down the box? The IR emitter is on the pointy top left corner,
which may have something to do with it being very directional. It’s heavy too,
deliberately so for some weird reason as there’s a chunk of mild steel bonded
to the printed circuit board!
BOX COPY 3 –
AROUND THE BACK
It’s good to
see lots of shiny gold plated contacts on the back of the T550, it may not have
much impact on picture and sound quality but it’s a reassuring sign that
pennies haven’t been pinched. The
T550’s rear panel contains a fairly routine assortment of socketry. The SCART
connector is configured for composite and RGB video output. There’s a 4-pin
mini DIN socket for S-Video and a phono carrying a second composite video feed.
Another phono socket handles the coaxial bitstream out and there’s a TOSlink
connector for the optical digital output. A bank of 8 phonos is used for the
analogue mixed stereo and the 5.1 channel outputs.
THE HARD FACTS
NAD T550
OUTPUTS
SCART Y
S-Video Y
RGB out Y
Component N
Optical digital Y
Coaxial digital Y
5.1 decoder Y
EXTRA FEATURES
Region 2,
PAL/NTSC replay, built-in Dolby Digital decoder, dts compatible bitstream
output, multi-speed replay, 2-mode picture zoom, 5-scene marker,
GOOD POINTS
Audio quality,
styling
BAD POINTS
Hopeless remote,
ordinary picture
Ease of use 3
Picture 3
Sound 5
Features 3
Overall 4
BUYERS GUIDE
EXTRA INFO
Price £500
SCART 1
S-Video 1
Digital out coaxial, optical
Decoder Dolby Digital
Good Points
Audio quality,
styling
Bad points
Hopeless
remote, ordinary picture
Rating
3
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Ó R. Maybury 2000, 0706
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