June 2003 Reviewed by Jeff Van Dyne	NAD L70 DVD Receiver

Description Model: NAD L70 Price: $999 USD Dimensions: 17.125"W x 5.25"H x 14.75"D Weight: 25 pounds Warranty: Two years parts and labor Features Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Pro Logic II, EARS, Enhanced Stereo Integrated single-disc DVD player 60W x 2 output (stereo) or 45W x 5 output (surround)

Features (cont'd) 5.1 multichannel analog input Two digital inputs (one coaxial, one optical) One optical digital output One component-video output (DVD) Three S-video and composite inputs (one front mounted, two back mounted) Two S-video and composite outputs (VCR, monitor) Three analog audio inputs (one front mounted) 12V DC trigger AM/FM stereo tuner with 30 presets for each band Universal programmable learning remote

The NAD L70 has to be one of the most interesting-looking audio components to cross my threshold in a very long time. Its ovoid display window and matching DVD tray attract your attention from across the room and fairly demand that you take notice. Like the Linn Classik Movie System that immediately preceded the NAD in my review system, this is one good-looking piece of equipment. Where the style of the Linn is kind of "dinner and the theater," the NAD is more "daiquiris at the jazz bar." Personally, I like both of them, but the NAD is just plain cool looking. Let’s call it retro cool. Shall I still think that in 10 years? I’m not so sure, but for now, I’m impressed that NAD had the courage to break from the traditional boring black box and build an affordable system with character.

But enough of that; it’s time to get down to brass tacks and discuss what this receiver-slash-DVD player is all about. Simply put, the $999-USD L70 is going after the same market as the Linn Classik: the city apartment dweller like my brother, who can’t afford to give up much precious real estate to a huge stack of electronic components. I also see applications where the simplification of having the control unit and DVD player in one box would be appealing for the less technically inclined. Short of some of the smaller home-theater-in-a-box systems, there just hasn’t been much to satisfy these needs until recently. Now NAD has entered the market to up the ante with a more conventionally sized component at a price more of us can afford.

Retro looks but not retro features

The NAD L70 is a fully modern component, possessing all the key features you would expect to find in a well-designed receiver. Its feature list, while not excessively long, does contain the expected Dolby Digital and DTS, and also includes Pro Logic II, a proprietary NAD surround mode called EARS, and Enhanced Stereo, which uses all of the speakers configured in your system. All modes, including Enhanced Stereo, use the subwoofer (if one is present).

The input complement isn’t exactly extensive. I felt the L70 could use an additional input or two, but it had enough connections to satisfy my modest budget system. The biggest surprise in the package was a very good learning remote. While not quite up to the level of flexibility of the Home Theater Master MX-500 I normally use, it’s a pleasant step up from the remotes usually supplied in this price range. As a consideration of overall cost, this remote comfortably controlled all of the components in my system, negating the need to spend $100 or more on a separate universal remote.

Retro setup?

I expected a fully integrated setup routine that would simplify the install process, but I was mistaken. There are independent processes for the receiver and DVD player. While this is certainly not a fatal flaw, it does have the effect of making the unit more difficult to configure. To get to the DVD setup menu you press the Setup button on the front of the unit, but to get to the receiver setup menu you have to press and hold the button for a few seconds. I guess it works, but it’s not exactly intuitive. To make matters worse this routine can only be activated from the front panel, as there’s no equal button on the remote. 

There are other odd quirks about the user interface as well. The fact that the receiver portion (but not the DVD) of the on-screen display (OSD) is controlled by a switch on the back of the unit is one of them. I missed this when I unpacked the L70, and it took a bit to figure out why I was getting an OSD from the DVD player and not the receiver. The switch was set to composite and I was using an S-video connection. I’ll admit to being a little annoyed by this, but the remainder of the setup was so simple that I almost forgot about it. That is, until I got to the speaker-distance settings and found that the settings are in milliseconds instead of feet or meters. Now, I don’t normally think about speaker distances in terms of time offsets, so I don’t generally make those conversions in my head. And NAD doesn’t give you a table in the owner’s manual, so you’re left to guess or go find your own conversion table. Luckily for me, I happened to remember that Dolby had a table on their website. After a little searching I was able to dig up the information I needed. None of this is all that big a deal, but as this is an integrated unit, the target market is likely to lean toward less-experienced home-theater owners, and these will be more than minor annoyances to them. The good news is that once past this point there’s rarely a need to go back into the setup menus, so it should be relatively smooth sailing from that point forward.

As a side note, something I’d truly love to see is for home-theater manufacturers to take a page from the software industry and provide something akin to a setup wizard for complex components like receivers and DVD players. The process for setting up a home theater is far too complex for many people to understand and complete in a reasonable amount of time, and a simple user interface that walks the buyer through the process would be a huge selling point for a lot of people. Unfortunately, it’s the rare manufacturer that even does a passable job of this in the owner’s manual, so I don’t expect to see a flurry of new receivers with setup wizards anytime soon.

Video

One of the first movies I watched was The Bourne Identity. Initially, the colors were a little muted, but once I ran through a quick recalibration of my TV and boosted the color level a few notches, they were good. With these settings my TV exhibited none of the usual red push, which has always plagued it to some extent with most DVD players. On a less positive note, the player displayed severe jagged edges on some material. This was readily identifiable as a swimming effect on the grille of the MINI Cooper as Bourne and Marie pull into a parking space during chapter 9. It was also noticeable at other times as more mild motion artifacts with diagonal lines, such as the edges of the mountain road in the previous scene. Most of the time this wasn’t distracting, but was more apparent on my larger RPTV than it was on a smaller 27" direct-view set.

Another odd quirk of the user interface is that the player seems to be able to detect and switch between Dolby Digital and DTS modes automatically, based on the input signal, but you must manually switch between surround and stereo when alternating between DVDs and CDs. My Onkyo receiver makes the distinction between stereo and multichannel bitstreams on its digital input and adjusts accordingly. This is another one of those odd anomalies that make the L70 just a little less user-friendly than it could be.

The piles of hay in the opening scene of Star Trek: Insurrection are something of a torture test for many DVD players. In the worst cases the straw seems to swim, while in the best it’s very stable. With the L70 there was some shimmer and movement that was out of place but nothing overtly distracting. As with the grille on the car in The Bourne Identity, there was also some swimming in the diagonal lines of the vent grilles on the bridge of the Enterprise. Otherwise, the L70 performed admirably, with good detail and resolution.

During Shrek, it became apparent that my color settings were still a little low, so I pushed them another couple of notches higher. The picture was softer than my Panasonic RV-32 DVD player, but was about on par with my Sony DVP-S300. Sometimes I prefer the Sony’s softer presentation as the effect seems more film-like and this was the case with the L70 as well, so this seems like a reasonable tradeoff. In all aspects the NAD proved to be a competent, if not stellar, video performer.

Audio

If the L70’s video performance was only average, its audio performance was anything but. On the remastered Verve recording of Getz/Gilberto [Verve 314 521 414-2] the NAD displayed clarity and openness that my Onkyo receiver, fed by either the Panasonic or Sony DVD players, simply couldn’t match. This was especially apparent on "The Girl From Ipanema," where Astrud Gilberto’s vocals are nothing short of stunning. The Linn Classik Movie System did no better on this cut than the NAD, which is an accomplishment considering the Linn costs three times as much.

During the course of listening to the Getz/Gilberto CD, I was interrupted no fewer than three times, which is annoying enough. However, the L70 "times out" when paused for more than a few minutes, and powers itself down. With DVDs the L70 is smart enough to pick up where it left off, but with CDs it would always start over from the beginning. Maybe your house is different, but interruptions of one form or another are a matter of course in mine, and I quickly tired of the CD player turning itself off every time I paused to answer the phone or talk to one of the kids. There should be a parameter to disable this feature.

Moving on to Monty Alexander’s My America [Telarc SACD-63552], the NAD again impressed with its musical prowess, displaying astonishing clarity and richness. This proved to be one of the few components in my possession that could lock down the imaging on the Mirage OMNI 50 speakers, which have a 360-degree dispersion pattern that tends to sacrifice imaging for openness. I first realized this with the accordion in "Mack The Knife," but it became more apparent with each cut I listened to. Oddly enough, I swapped out the NAD for my Onkyo receiver on the same day I auditioned the NAD/Mirage combo and found the NAD not only to be more detailed but also to provide a more solid foundation of bass than the Onkyo did with the Mirage speakers. This is counter to what I normally expect from a receiver with less power, but the NAD helped produce a very clean and powerful bass line for "Honky Tonk" -- a feat the Onkyo was unable to accomplish with the same track and speakers.

Sometimes more detailed sound comes from added brightness in a component or speaker, so when I hear increased detail, I make it a point to check brightness with a recording that I frequently find bright under normal circumstances. If the recording becomes painfully bright then I know I have a problem. One such recording is Jane Monheit’s Come Dream with Me [N-Coded Music 4219-2], and I didn’t hesitate to try it out with the NAD. The worst offender on this CD is probably "Over the Rainbow," and I didn’t find it to be any brighter through the NAD than with any other receiver I’ve had on hand recently, including a couple of Onkyos and a Marantz. Additionally, the layering of foreground and background vocals on "If" was second to none.

Comparison

The NAD L70 is about the size of a conventional receiver, which makes it roughly four times the size of the diminutive Linn, but still saves on space by including a DVD player in the same package. Power output for the two is close enough not to make any real difference, though the NAD runs a bit cooler and thus the fan runs much less frequently. The fan on the NAD is also much quieter, which may be of interest to those living in very small spaces.

Operationally, I found the NAD much easier to navigate when used with the supplied remote, though both were about equal once programmed into my MX-500. The Linn produced one of the better pictures I’ve seen from an interlaced DVD player, producing very few artifacts, which is what one should expect from a unit in its price range. In comparison, the NAD’s picture was about on par with a decent-quality budget player, which is to say it produced occasional video artifacts, some of which were moderately distracting. Also, color saturation isn’t quite what I’ve come to expect from DVD and I had to recalibrate my TV accordingly. On the plus side, the NAD does nothing to aggravate the usual red push most TV sets are guilty of. In other words, the NAD’s video performance is about on par with its price class but doesn’t transcend it.

Where audio quality is concerned, the two units finish much closer to each other than might be expected by looking at their respective prices. True, the Linn is slightly more detailed and open than the NAD, but only slightly. This is offset by the less-obtrusive fan on the NAD, making the two units a virtual sonic tie to my ears. The NAD actually comes out ahead with regard to processing and connection features. The 5.1 inputs allow connection of an outboard DVD/SACD/DVD-A player down the road, should the owner feel so compelled. The inclusion of Pro Logic II and the ability to perform audio processing on external analog inputs is also a big plus over the Linn. Add in a couple of additional S-video inputs and it quickly becomes apparent that the NAD provides a level of flexibility as a control unit that the Linn lacks.

Conclusion

The NAD L70 is a competent performer in a category and price range where it has few, if any, peers. While I was moderately disappointed in the video quality from the DVD player, the audio quality of the L70 exceeded my expectations, especially in stereo mode. Once through the setup process, the NAD L70 proved to be simple enough to operate and its excellent remote turned out to be one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve encountered in a sub-$1000 component in quite some time.

Outside of a few quibbles with the user interface, the NAD L70 is a pleasing performer with enough control flexibility for a small apartment or bedroom theater system. What it lacks in video sophistication it more than makes up for in audio performance. For those searching for a compact audio system that will also serve as a video source, the NAD L70 would be an excellent choice.   

Manufacturer contact information:

NAD Electronics International
633 Granite Court
Pickering, Ontario
Canada L1W3K1
Phone: (800) 263-4641 (North America), (905) 831-0799 (worldwide)

Website: www.nadelectronics.com
E-mail: nad@NADelectronics.com

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