I recently purchased a Nad M50 (£2000) after blind testing it against the Cyrus Stream X2 (£1000) and the Bryston BDP 2 (£3400).
I actually wasn't expecting to hear much difference, but I couldn't be more wrong.
The Cyrus was cold, very digital sounding and perhaps a little tinny. Not very engaging.
The Bryston and Nad were very similar in sound quality but to me and the other 3 in the room the Nad pipped the Bryston in the overal detail and had a more analogue sound. Very engaging. But both were very nice.
So it came down to cost and control point use.
The Nad has by far the best control point software of any streamer I have used and owned. I used to have a Linn Akurate DS1, Marantz NA 7004, and a denon to which the model number evades me.
I got the nad home, attached it via AES/EBU to my Datasat RS20i processor and plugged it into my home network. It found my Readynas duo and started indexing files.
It allows me to do a full search of any song across my 6Tb of flacs and wavs. And also a full random play. All other streamers I have owned will only search and random play from the main directory and will not search sub directories. The nad is very computer like in that fashion which is brilliant.
Internet radio sounds really good thru the nad.
i had previously been playing with my pc with sotm USB 3 card and sotm USB to spdif converter. I found the sound from this using Jriver very flat, cold and not at all musical.
So today compared my nad to my freinds Cap zuma build using an empirical audio off ramp 5 with all the mods. I did it blind all the connecting and swapping of inputs so the test was not blind for me, but was for my friend.
We included a pink noise as the first track to ensure the same spl level from both machines. And we both found the nad to be more musical and, well, nicer to listen to. I could throw in all the flowery adjectives but I won't bother, in my system, to us listeners the nad was more dynamic, greater attack and again more analogue sounding.
Needless to say my mate is putting his zuma upstairs in his bedroom and buying a nad for his main listening room.
The system used for comparing the Nad to the caps comprises of Datasat RS20i processor, ADA 2502 amps biamping B&W 802D speakers. All powered from Shunyata Hydra 6 conditioner for amps and Ag1500 regenerators for processors, pc and nad.
When playing thru multichannel upmix, the centres is HTM1D, side Sig 8NT, and all other rears, rear and front heights are 805d speakers.
