March 2010 Reviewed by Colin Smith	NAD T 747 Audio/Video Receiver

Description Model: T 747 Price: $1200 USD Dimensions: 17 1/8"W x 6 9/16"H x 15 1/2"D Weight: 30 pounds Warranty: Two years parts and labor. Features 60W x 7 channels (manufacturer rating) Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio lossless decoding Auto Setup and Calibration of speaker settings with supplied microphone

Features (cont'd) Data Port for use with optional NAD iPod dock Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS-HD Master Audio, DTS 96/24, DTS Neo:6 Custom A/V presets permit instant recall of unique speaker, listening mode, and tone settings AM/FM tuner with 60 presets (30 AM, 30 FM), Optional DAB (230V) or XM (120V) tuner modules 4 HDMI inputs with repeater function Analog video inputs converted to digital HDMI output SD signals converted to HD up to 1080p with onboard Faroudja DCDi processing Dolby Virtual Surround

It’s not many audio products that can cause a reviewer to swoon as soon as they emerge from the box, but that’s what happened when I first laid eyes on NAD’s T 747 home-theater receiver ($1200). I’ve owned several NAD products over the years, and they’ve shared three key attributes: they were inexpensive, they had performance well beyond their price, and they were as attractive as a mud brick.

An NAD product that looks as good as it sounds is a relatively new phenomenon for this sister company of renowned speaker maker PSB. A few years ago, NAD introduced its Masters Series components, which, though still considerable bargains given their ratio of performance to price, definitely had to look the part of high-end components. This they did with aplomb, but the high-end look at the lower end of NAD’s pricing structure is still something relatively new, seen before only in their all-in-one Visio series.

Description

The T 747 isn’t just a pretty face. It’s a thoroughly up-to-date high-definition receiver featuring everything expected at its price: seven full channels of amplification, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio lossless decoding, Dolby Digital Plus, Pro Logic IIx, Neo:6, and more digital and analog inputs than most people will ever use. On the video side, the T 747 features four HDMI inputs, and Faroudja DCDi video upsampling all the way to 1080p. All seven speaker outputs use sturdy five-way binding posts, and all RCA input jacks are gold-plated. For those who enjoy using aftermarket power cables, the T 747 has a standard IEC power inlet and a detachable cord. The only two surprising omissions among the T 747’s standard features are an iPod dock (NAD offers one as an option), and backlighting for the remote control. I find the latter a particular annoyance, though to be fair, NAD is hardly alone in this regard. However, I did like the classy, gloss-black finish of the T 747’s remote -- a nice departure from the standard, dreary browns, grays, and flat blacks.

I didn’t discuss power ratings above because the T 747’s output ratings require some explanation. If you read my discussion ("A Powerful Standard," GoodSound!, December 2009) of power ratings for subwoofer amplifiers, you’ll know that the numbers manufacturers state -- and salespeople repeat -- for 99% of audio amplifiers are wholly unrealistic. Think of them as being the electrical equivalent of vehicle fuel-economy ratings, which are often wildly optimistic, and calculated using a process that bears no resemblance to how people actually drive.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) dictates how amplifier power ratings are determined. The FTC method requires that an amplifier’s output be measured at the amp’s outputs while it drives a 1kHz tone into an 8-ohm resistor load for one hour. There are a couple of problems here. First, music consists of tones that generally run from 20Hz to 20kHz, so measuring power output at 1kHz doesn’t tell us a whole lot. Second, a resistor load is constant and unwavering, but a speaker load is not. A speaker might be said to have an impedance of "8 ohms," but that’s an average. The actual load seen by the amplifier will vary, and is dependent on the frequency being amplified at any given moment. Therefore, the "peak" power output at 1kHz tells us little about an amplifier’s grunt at low frequencies, where power is most needed.

The T 747’s published specifications include two power ratings. The larger, 120W of "minimum continuous power," is derived from NAD’s version of the FTC method and, as the words in quotes imply, doesn’t reveal peak power. Instead, it illustrates the amplifier’s ability to push 120W of "FTC" power until the cows come home. The other power rating, 60Wpc of "full disclosure power," is derived from real-world measurements that allow NAD’s engineers to sleep soundly, knowing that they’re not pulling the wool over consumers’ eyes. This wattage is calculated into a 4-ohm load that, NAD says, is a very good facsimile of a real speaker load. Moreover -- and this is key -- to determine its "full disclosure power" rating, NAD measures output across the full audioband of 20Hz-20kHz. So when comparing the T 747 to its competitors, use the higher power rating; it corresponds most closely to the industry norm.

What to make of all this power talk? Just this: the NAD T 747 generates more than enough power to satisfy the vast majority of users. However, if, after this explanation, that "60W" rating still seems feeble, remember that with powered subwoofers taking responsibility for the most power-hungry audio frequencies, not a lot of oomph is required for the nonbass frequencies.

Setup

Once I got passed the drooling stage, I removed my stalwart Marantz SR-8400 receiver and put in its place the T 747. Like the Marantz, the NAD’s five-way binding posts for all seven channels are tightly packed on a very full rear panel. I learned a long time ago that the only way to attach speaker cables to a receiver is with locking banana plugs; they don’t infringe on their neighbors’ space, and won’t be pulled loose to short out on an adjacent connector. That’s just what I did here. I also ran the HDMI output of my Sony BDP-350 Blu-ray player into the T 747 to carry both the digital audio and high-definition video signal, and used another HDMI cable to connect the T 747 to my Panasonic plasma TV.

The first step in setting up the T 747 involves calibrating it to the speakers it powers and the room it’s in. This is accomplished using an included microphone attached to a very long cable. NAD wisely chose to put the connector for the microphone on the receiver’s front panel, where it lives with an HDMI connector under a little rubber door at the right bottom of the T 747’s faceplate. The onscreen menus were simple to follow, and the whole calibration process took only about a minute. Per instructions, I placed the microphone at my listening position, at the height of my ears when I’m sitting down.

This whole auto-calibration thing is way better than my Marantz’s manual setup (which is not onscreen), for which the speaker’s size, height, and distance from the listening position all must be input. For seven speakers, that’s a tedious chore. Thank heaven for modern ideas. The T 747 also features a host of setup menus for video and audio formats that are easy to navigate, among them a video option to set the output resolution for the Faroudja DCDi processor at any resolution from 480i all the way to 1080p.

Sound

I bought my Marantz SR-8400 receiver ($1500 new) a few years ago, mostly because it was thought to offer superior musicality, and I’ve enjoyed its performance as a secondary music source ever since. Unfortunately, the NAD T 747 has ruined the Marantz for me. If the SR-8400 is musical, the T 747 is downright orchestral.

Viewers and film critics might focus on sound effects, but a movie without music would be unwatchable. After all, it wasn’t the fake shark in Jaws that scared the hell out of us, but John Williams’s unmistakable music, which preceded each appearance of the beast. A film that features both great music and great performances is Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s telling of a 1960s love story through the music of the Beatles. My favorite scene is Joe Cocker’s performance of "Come Together." The song’s multichannel mix was rendered by the T 747 as a uniform soundfield. I wrote of the Revel Concerta speakers that it was hard to tell where the output of one speaker left off and that of the next began, so seamless was the surrounding envelope of sound. The NAD T 747 enhanced even this seamlessness -- Cocker’s performance truly surrounded the listening position, sounding as three-dimensional as Avatar looks.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a mishmash of story lines from the two historical novels (their respective titles appear to either side of the colon in the film’s title) by the late and very great Patrick O’Brian. What the movie lacks in continuity and character portrayal (Russell Crowe’s Jack Aubrey is a caricature of O’Brian’s protagonist) it makes up for in cinematography and sound. If there’s a better test of a surround system than a below-decks scene aboard a wooden sailing ship, I don’t know what it is. The creaking of timbers, the splashing of waves against hull, the squeak of rats, the muffled calls of deckhands, and the murmur of distant conversation -- all can sound amazingly real through a good system, and awfully confused through poor equipment. The T 747 was firmly in the former category. The utterly realistic 3D belowdecks space created by the T 747 made me feel as though I was back aboard the faithful reproduction of the HMS Bounty I sailed on out of Perth, Australia, some years ago. Every sound seemed to appear as if by magic in the precise location it should be in a soundfield that was ultimately much larger than the distance between the speakers.

I’m a huge fan of HBO’s Band of Brothers miniseries, for the quality of its craft and for the true stories it retells. A great taste of its sound engineering is heard in episode 6, "Bastogne," scenes 3 and 4 of which take place in the catacombs of a bomb-damaged church filled to the rafters with wounded soldiers. Hardly a pleasant scene to watch or listen to, it gives a strong sense of the horror of that place and time. Through the T 747, the cumulative effect of the soldiers’ moans, and their gasps of pain and for breath, all echoing from the church’s ancient substructure, was as horrid and haunting as the director clearly intended it to be. What’s more, the sound was so clear that I couldn’t help but become emotionally entangled on a level that just isn’t there when I hear this scene through other receivers.

Video

I could detect no difference between a direct HDMI connection between Blu-ray player and TV or the player’s signal passing through the T 747. Where I did see a difference was in upsampling standard-definition TV to some higher resolution. It definitely wasn’t 1080p, but the picture was somewhat sharper than without Faroudja processing. This is a classic case of not being able to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear -- but I hadn’t expected miracles from the T 747 in this department, so I wasn’t disappointed.

Comparison

Although pitting my older Marantz SR-8400 against the T 747 might seem a comparison of apples to oranges, it served as a bold illustration of the benefits to be had from upgrading to the newer technology. The same scenes discussed above sounded just fine through the SR-8400, but the qualitative difference between Dolby Digital and TrueHD was heavily in favor of the latter, and as subtle as a sledgehammer dropped on a toe. The far greater accuracy of sound-effects placements was easily noticeable, as was an overall enhancement of sound clarity, especially in dialogue emanating from the center-channel speaker. Not surprisingly, the T 747 (60Wpc) had no less punch than the ostensibly more powerful SR-8400 (110W).

Two-channel sound offered a more level playing field, and when I used the analog inputs, was a direct test of each receiver’s preamp and amplification circuits. Here the contest wasn’t as clear-cut. The SR-8400 excels at two-channel audio, and Marantz paid particular attention to the circuit layout, using copper shielding to achieve as close to a noise-free signal path as can reasonably be expected in a receiver packed full of electronics. The result is a dynamic, driven sound that is more detailed than I’d previously expected from a receiver. As far as I know, NAD doesn’t specifically use copper shielding inside the T 747, but I found its sound as clean and detailed as the Marantz’s -- and, thanks probably to its extremely potent power supply, the NAD also packed more punch than the SR-8400. When it comes to ease of setup and use, the SR-8400, which has neither HDMI inputs, onscreen menus, nor one-step microphone calibration, can’t compete with the newer NAD. Where the SR-8400 is clearly superior is in its illuminated remote.

Conclusion

The T 747’s look might be new, but this latest NAD creation adheres to the company’s founding philosophy: that high-quality sound doesn’t have to come at a high price. I appreciate NAD’s intellectual honesty in stating its products’ power ratings, and never felt for a moment that the T 747 was underpowered. With easy-to-follow onscreen menus, bulletproof speaker/room calibration software, and a sleek, modern appearance, there’s a lot to like about the NAD T 747. If it had a backlit remote, it might be darn near perfect.

Manufacturer contact information:

NAD Electronics International
633 Granite Court
Pickering, Ontario L1W 3K1
Canada
Phone: (800) 263-4641

Website: www.nadelectronics.com

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