Go NAD! As the Belgian super sleuth Hercule Poirot would have said, this quasi adolescent entry by then Stereophile reviewer Corey Greenberg stuck to my leetle gray cells. I don't remember the particular New Audio Dimension component which followed our would-be gonzo journalist's, er - ballsy intro. I only remember his clever implication. NAD had real cojones for doing whatever they were up to at the time. Whilst we're still well in the past, NAD used to be about compact grey boxes with square green power buttons. They eschewed blingy lights, meters and puffed-up power specs. Then they made up for lack of shallow sex appeal with more mature sound. They also had more useful short-term peak power delivery than flashier competitors. And yes, the NAD 3020i integrated of the 1970s sold more than a million units. It minted more student audiophiles than perhaps any other component of its time. So iconic did this slightly drab but sonic overachiever become that the company resurrected its nomenclature with today's vertical/horizontal hybrid digital deck shown below right next to the original.

Without raiding any silly-money coffers, NAD in 2014 have clearly muscled up to the high-end plate. They've branched out beyond their core audience of yore. But just because NAD have expanded upwards doesn't see to have distracted them from their value focus. Nowhere is this more evident than in the new M22 stereo amplifier with its Hypex nCore heart. Having two years ago reviewed an nCore 1200-based amplifier in the Acoustic Imagery Atsah monos, I'd become an instant fan of Bruno Putzeys' latest most powerful uptake on his established Hypex UcD or Universal class D platform. Sadly retail pricing for the Atsah and competitors from Bel Canto Design, Jeff Rowland Design Group, Merrill Audio and Mola Mola starts at about €10'000/pr. The only ones with access to the more affordable NC400 modules were DIYers. They could roll slightly less powerful versions for ~€2'000 in nice if not flashy casings. The proviso? They could do so only as long as they did it for personal not commercial use.


With the $2'999 M22, NAD are first to bring nCore tech to the masses. Aussie contributor John Darko kicked off this story's center when he published a news post with this intriguing tidbit. It quotes NAD Director of Technology and Product Planning Greg Stidsen: "We developed our own nCore module in close cooperation with Hypex.  It is based on the NC400 not NC1200 module but this is not a qualitative difference. It only affects power output. We can do this because we will build and sell a lot of units. The NC1200 was developed primarily for the pro market where huge power is required. In the Hypex NC400 module, continuous power is 200w@8Ω and 400w@4Ω. In our implementation it is 250w@8/4Ω controlled by Erik Edvardsen’s precision clipper circuit. The benefit of this approach is the ability to offer much more short term or dynamic power. Here we have 350w@8Ω and 600w@4Ω. In typical NAD tradition, this makes the power in actual use seem greater than the spec!"

Applying more 'mass-market' scale of operations and distribution than most high-end companies have at their disposal, NAD have secured access to customized nCore tech whereby they may enter a market sector which due to the deliberately high pricing of the NC1200 platform is sealed off to existing commercial competitors. Bruno Putzeys' very strange business model of course has not prevented certain small operators from circumventing his NC400 DIY regulation. Some enterprising chaps still manage to get turn-key amps based on stock NC400 modules with their matching SMPS into the hands of end users who aren't keen on solder fumes. But for a fully legit commercial product, NAD to my knowledge are first to give us nCore performance for €3'000 whilst diverging from the Hypex script on the actual boards. Many commercial NC1200 offerings are nothing but shiny repackaging jobs. Inside fancy casings they house completely stock modules similar to how many ICEpower and Pascal competitors do it. Yet their nCore marketing copy waxes poetic over performance enhancements like fancy hookup wiring, designer socketry, custom power cords, special footers and milled-from-solid case work. Reviewers covering this gear routinely pay primary homage to the 'designers' of these parts packages only to fail to properly credit the Dutch Bruno Putzeys for 95% of the recipe which is actually responsible for the sound.


Given this background, within a day of Darko's post I had requested Greg Stidsen's email contact. My nCore button had been slammed. Hard. And a day later it chimed again. Greg responded in the affirmative to my review interest. He also suggested that he really ought to send along the matching modular M12 preamp. It handles volume control in the digital domain like the M51 DAC. I accepted. Clearly NAD had come a long way from the days when my wife and I ran their plain gray 3020i in our shared massage studio in Santa Rosa, California. It was time I refamiliarized myself with the brand. And I had more questions for Greg Stidsen particularly on the M22.