I have been thinking about the term planned obsolescence for quite a long time. It seems that no matter what technology product you buy in the shortest of time it has been replaced by the newer better one. Case in point when HDMI first came out we had HDMI 1.0. Many people ran out and bought the DMY980R 5.1 home theater receiver. Now the 150 watt version of this home theater receiver cost $5,000.00. This unit had 2 HDMI inputs and no Dolby Digital True HD or DTS Master Pro. Well in 6 months the 1.2 version of HDMI came out and you now owned a receiver that could be put in the boat anchor category. It literally is no different than if you had bought the $500.00 DMY receiver. Currently, we are up to HDMI 1.4 and now need many HDMI inputs, 3D and streaming all of which won’t work with your “state of the art” $5,000.00 receiver of four years ago. I am sure we all have had a similar experience with one technology product or another.
So how do we avoid this problem? NAD has come up with a brilliant solution to this. It’s called MDC or Modular Design construction. It is used in both home theater and two channel products. What this design allows us to do, by the replacing of plug in boards via the rear panel, is upgrade your NAD receiver or pre-amp to current standards for both digital video (HDMI) and digital audio. This design is about as future proof as possible. Anyone who owns an NAD T765, T775, and T785, which were HDMI 1.2, can now be upgraded to HDMI 1.4 which will pass 3D and incorporate Dolby Digital true HD and DTS Master Pro. You can even add more HDMI inputs then the original 4 that came with the unit. To me this is what state of the art technology should be.
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Performance wise the NAD MDC products, for the money, are the best sounding on the market. They are what I would call high value hi end products. They don’t stream from the internet; they know your Blu-Ray does so why duplicate features. No matter what music or movies you play through them their sound is warm, dynamic, and transparent. They will unravel all the finest details in music and roar like a rocket ship blasting off on your favorite movie.
I have lived with NAD products for the last 5 years and aside from spending three or four times the cost I have no desire to change. Whether it’s multi channel or two channel NAD is a solid value.
Bill Carnes