NAD C545BEE CD-player
The appearance of NAD C545 is no longer as conservative and unshowy as before, but while maintaining a recognizable corporate style, the designers managed to make it more animated. The player is a creatively redesigned version of the very successful NAD C542, which has received many prestigious awards around the world.
In addition to appearance, the circuitry was also significantly improved. Now the power circuit uses a higher-quality toroidal transformer with separate sections for digital and analog parts, and the output stage uses Burr-Brown OPA2134 amplifiers, known to all audiophiles. Nothing is reported about the DAC, it is only known that it is a chip of the same brand with 24/192 parameters, which does not support HDCD. However, CDs with this encoding come across less and less.
The player path is designed so that the signal path is extremely short, with minimal impact on the sound. The element base is also good - only polypropylene capacitors and high-precision metal film resistors. The digital outputs are of both types in NAD C545 - optical and coaxial, but headphone jack is not provided. Developers emphasize the low output impedance of analog buffers, which in practice should minimize the effect of interconnect cables.
NAD C545 is characterized by its emphasis on low-frequency register. This does not mean that bass components prevail in the sound, on the contrary, the overall tonal balance is quite strict. It seems that when developing, a special attention was paid to the quality of the low-frequency spectrum transfer - the relief of bass instruments is close to ideal, and some high-end models might envy the expression and confidence in work with this range. For lovers of rock music, where the coordinated work of the rhythm section is very important, this player is just a godsend.
But the mid-range was less impressive. Vocal parts sometimes seem to be not enough worked out and, sometimes, rude. The upper range is drawn quite clearly and has no lack of detail. But the plates are not as crumbly as we would like.
The sound stage is formed correctly, with sufficient depth, although only the images of the foreground are confidently localized.
Changes in the switching to mp3 and WMA are quite expected - the dynamic range narrows, the middle becomes callous and gets a metallic hue. This proves again that there are no miracles in compression.
