One Box : NAD C700 $1500 Sale Price
80 Watts Per Channel Into 8 Ohms
{3 3/16h, 8 5/8w, 11 5/8d}
If you listen to your music primarily by streaming, the NAD C700 is a very smart purchase. The smartest?!
All you have to do is add speakers and you’re good to go with streaming through C700.
C700 has enough power for most speakers.
It has a preamp output if you choose to add a more powerful amp later.
It has a subwoofer output as well.
You can add additional sources through these inputs:
*Optical
*Coax
*Analog 1
*Analog 2
*eARC HDMI
*Bluetooth
Comparison
To appreciate how good a value C700 is, let’s compare it with its main competitor, the Naim Uniti Atom. It runs $3800 and has 40 w/ch. Advantage C700.
NAD uses its PowerDrive Hypex amplifier design. Naim uses a traditional pair of output devices for each channel. With double the power, invariant impedance behavior, lower heat and price, as well as distortion that’s all but impossible to measure, C700 earns the win here.
The feature set is similar on each unit. But NAD has the edge because C700 has a subwoofer output jack. Naim doesn’t.
NAD uses an ESS Sabre 32b DAC. Naim uses a 32b Texas Instruments DAC. Edge to NAD.
Both NAD and Naim have a nice screen display of music. Draw.
While C700’s advantages above are noteworthy, the biggest win yet goes to NAD’s Bluesound streaming platform. Bluesound is the most mature and reliable streaming platform on the market. NAD has been supporting it fastidiously since its inception in 2013. That is a major advantage!
We have learned that the SUPPORT a company provides is even more important than the box they sell you. ANYONE can sell you a box with promises. Making it WORK as advertised is an altogether more challenging task.
There are many other streaming devices on the market. Even today, many of them buffer, cough and sputter as they try to stay on the bucking bronco that is the internet. NAD is an international company with deep pockets. They have supported streaming along with all of its updates and curve balls since its inception.
We did sell Naim some years ago. I thought their CD players and integrated amps were very good sounding. The problem was that their streaming was erratic and buggy. The buffering of pay services, or just internet radio, made you wanna scream. They would sputter or just QUIT, while Bluesound JUST WORKED. Hence, bye bye Naim.
Streaming started taking over the world about 2013. NAD/Bluesound has been, and continues to be, the most reliable method to stream music in the audiophile hobby. When you weigh all the features and tasks of a one box, integrated amp/streamer, NAD’s C700 is our choice by a mile.
Read about it HERE (Dave’s Faves)
