Can't say it's crazy until you've recapped it. Just because it's good now doesn't mean it can't be better.
A little bit of a story here. Back in the early 80s I was running a Marantz setup, I forget the amp model number, but it was one of the nice champagne gold finish ones. I went round to a friends place and he had a TEAC CD player and a NAD3020 playing through a pair of transmission line speakers he had built as a university project. I was absolutely blown away by the sound. Not a lot of bass, but the detail was astonishing. We put the amp against my Marantz playing through a pair of Goodmans 3 way speakers with 12" bass units and the sound was amazing. Obviously the poor little thing started running out of steam at higher volume levels, but the detail was quite astonishing.
Coming up to date - I run a fully active system using a Rotel RB976Mk2 6 channel power amp from active crossovers. I have used various preamps and I came across a NAD C320 and I though I could use this as a preamp. I tried this and I was quite disappointed with the sound. It was kind of flat, undynamic and shrouded. It went away in a box for a while. I got to looking at the circuit diagrams of the Cxxx NAD range and I was very impressed with the power amp and PSU designs, so the 320 came out again and I tried it as a power amp. It was very good. So what was going on?
All these amps have preamp modules fitted as small daughter boards standing upright on the main board. They are a simple class A emitter follower preamp with a JFET transistor at the front. They also generate quite a high dc offset at their outputs which requite large in-line decoupling capacitors - generally not a good thing to have as they also act as a LF rolloff filter.
After a lot of thinking and calculating I replaced each of these with a small board housing a NE5532 OPamp. The effect was absolutely astonishing. It was just transparent. The whole system just opened up. I have since replaced these with OPA2143 devices which are even better. As the OPA2143 has almost no dc offset at all, it was also possible to remove the large decoupling capacitors from the audio chain. A couple were replaced with small film caps for HF oscillation damping. I have also added a 12v trigger circuit as used in the BEE version to trigger my power amp and other systems.
The point of this is that it would appear that the preamp circuits could be where the infamous 'NAD sound' comes from.
So, for the time being at least, the NAD is staying in place as a preamp/control unit.
If its working, its the bargain of the year. The green light is on which usually means they are ok.Story of my life,Could'nt possibly be a worse time for something like that to pop up.
And it's REAL close too,I could've easily popped down there and done a local P/U.
Working on thinning the herd soon,and I might could've done something once I do,but progress is moving pretty slowly around here.
I'm kinda trying to time that "thinning" with folks getting their income tax refunds,,,but everything related to the gov. is on hold these days...
D@ng.
Sigh,,,oh well there will always be other deals,,,just gotta be patient,,,right ???
Bret P.
This is a 7045. The 7060 has two separate grills on top:i've had/have a bunch of nad stuff
sold this a couple yrs ago
no idea the model number anymore
but the copper knobs sure made it pretty
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Thanks for the link!Nice receivers Jeremy Pare. Check here for more information on the NAD gear. https://www.vintageshifi.com/repertoire-pdf/Nad.php