Unveiled at CES back in January, NAD Electronics has now made its Master M33 system available for sale, an audiophile-grade streaming hi-fi amplifier that can serve as a multi-room hub for compatible devices all around the home.
"The NAD Masters M33 has created tremendous excitement since its preview at CES," said the company's Cas Ooostvogel. "As the first amplifier to utilize Purifi Eigentakt™ amplifier technology, its performance must be heard to be appreciated. The M33 is a true state-of-the-art audiophile amplifier in the traditional sense yet with a distinct difference: It fully caters to the modern world where the majority of music is delivered over the internet with an entire catalog of recorded music readily available at your fingertips. This is obviously a wonderful convenience. Then, the M33’s ability to distribute that music in a multi-room audio system just adds that much more enjoyment, simplicity and value."
The M33 features the BluOS multi-room audio platform cooked in, meaning it can act as a streaming hub for other compatible systems or speakers throughout the home. It can serve up lossless music at up to 24-bit/192-kHz resolution, supports a number of free and paid streaming services like Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz, as well as locally-stored libraries, and can be controlled using a mobile app, the supplied remote control, or via any Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant device.
If you want to go hands on with the NAD flagship, a 7-inch touchscreen panel dominates the front. Music stored on a phone or tablet can be sent wirelessly courtesy of Airplay 2 and Bluetooth aptX-HD, at its heart is a 32-bit/384-kHz ESS Sabre DAC, and it offers a minimum of 200 W per channel output with the promise of low distortion and low noise.
Other hi-fi hardware can be cabled up using the five digital and three analog inputs – including MM/MC phono with a phase canceling filter and RIAA equalization to hook up a turntable. The unit features a discrete headphone amplifier that's reported capable of driving even the most demanding of headphones, and there are two sets of speaker outputs for sharing the music with everyone else.
Built-in Dirac room correction technology can calibrate the system for optimum performance, with up to five different profile slots available for dealing with different acoustic scenarios in a room or setting genre-specific frequency target curves, and NAD has future-proofed the design by including a couple of expansion slots.
This has all the hallmarks of a monster hi-fi unit, which unfortunately comes with a beast of a suggested retail price of US$4,999.
Product page: M33