BluOS without some bells and whistles

NAD expands its lineup of hi-res streaming amplifi ers with the C 700, a more affordable – but still well-featured – alternative to its Masters Series hardware. Mark Craven investigates

- Mark Craven

THOSE WHO ADMIRED NAD's M10 two-channel, do-it-all streaming amplifier but were put offby the £2,200 price tag (see HCC #304) are clearly the target audience for the Canadian manufacturer's new C 700. Like the costlier Masters Series model, this compact component promises to drag your music playback into the 21st century via its hi-res capable BluOS streaming module, while chucking in a range of physical inputs for good measure, and then giving connected speakers a healthy punch of Class D amplification. Unlike the M10, however, it sells for £1,300.

Clearly some corners have been cut to take the specification of the M10 model and offer it at something approaching half the price. The most obvious of these, from perusing the product literature, is a drop in rated power output, down from 2 x 100W to 2 x 80W. Not an insignificant difference, but also not a serious reduction that would have me putting power-hungry loudspeakers to one side – especially knowing from past experience that NAD's amplification measurements are conservative rather than optimistic.

Yet there is a wrinkle to this. The M10 – now onto a V2 guise iteration that arrived last year – uses Hypex nCore Class D power modules, whereas the C 700 opts for less-advanced UcD devices. Additionally, the C 700 gets a lower-grade ESS DAC chip (the ES9010 rather than the M10's ES9028).