What Hi Fi Sound and Vision
12 FEB 2009
NAD C545BEE
On the face of it, it’s fair to say you wouldn’t think the
NAD C545BEE had unrivalled star quality.
It’s true that the design is cleaner and more rounded than previous NAD players while the slightly cheap looking remote control is compact and user-friendly.
As feature-counts go, the NAD ticks the usual boxes and includes optical and coaxial digital outputs, analogue outputs and the ability to play both MP3 and WMA-encoded discs.
But there’s nothing truly extraordinary there. It’s only when you pay attention to what’s beneath the skin that you realise the unusual level of care that has been taken in piecing this machine together.
The mains transformer is surprisingly chunky for a product at this price point.
There are separate power regulators for the analogue and digital sections to reduce interference, and a great deal of care has been taken over the types and makes of components used.
NAD has also gone beyond the call of duty fitting an isolating transformer to buffer the coaxial digital output, to help improve the quality of the digital data stream when using the player with an external DAC.
Everything properly in its place Beethoven’s
Symphony No.5 sounds pacey and invigorating. The NAD shows great agility and frivolity as the strings leap around.
With Rihanna’s
Hate That I Love You, the C545BEE draws you in with its spacious sound and reveals an extraordinary amount of detail for the money.
All the various elements of the track are arranged perfectly, with no exceptions, making some of the other CD players in this group sound messy and disorganized. Nothing stands out or sounds out of place.
Listen to Kanye West’s
Love Lockdown and you can hear that the low frequencies are pumped out with just the right quantities of weight, detail and punch.
The NAD doesn’t have the same amount of weight at its disposal as the Arcam FMJ CD17 or Marantz CD6002, but every note is precise and full of texture.
Even turning the display off makes a subtle yet audible difference to sound quality. Doing so injects an additional per cent or three of refinement.
The NAD C545BEE marks a tremendous return to form for the British company.
You could partner the NAD with more expensive electronics and speakers and confident in the knowledge that this player wouldn’t sound out of its depth.