NAD L53 DVD Player/Receiver

NAD L53 DVD Receiver:
the little box that could – do everything

Jack-of-all-trades; master of none?
          
I was apprehensive when I was asked to review NAD’s L53 DVD receiver, and after I went to the NAD web site I was downright worried.  This little box contains several shelves worth of audio components: a preamp, stereo amplifier, AM/FM tuner, DVD player that accommodates most formats (DVD-A and SACD excepted).  There’s a mysterious audio enhancement feature that allegedly simulates multichannel sound from two channels.  Just add a couple of speakers and you have a competent hifi system; plug in a monitor and you have home theater.
          
The concept runs contrary to our notion of high performance audio and video quality.  Amplifiers are supposed to be bulky, heavy items sprouting heat sinks and pouring out heat; good quality preamps aren’t supposed to have so many features; tuners live in separate chassis from both; and don’t even start talking about the mess of wires necessary for home theater.  Add to this the modest price, and I had to wonder whether NAD, champion of good-for-cheap, had promised far more than it could produce.  Six hundred bucks for a unit with all of these features?  There are isolation devices that cost four times as much.  How could this contraption sound any better than Circuit City trash?
 
Point of diminishing returns
          
I should have known better.  After all, my history with NAD products extends back nearly thirty years, when I found a used 3020 integrated amp for my girlfriend.  We were both impecunious graduate students and couldn’t afford any better.  Everyone knew that heavy, aggressively ugly separate components were better – until the evening the humble, drab NAD unit blew someone’s Apt/Holman unit away.
          
My first, reluctant step in this evaluation process was cautious: I replaced that same 3020 with the L53.  This is not weak competition.  The venerable 3020, twisted metal work and leaking capacitors, is still competitive with integrated amps in the $500 price range.
          
I can’t tell you precisely how the 3020 sounded in 1978, but the L53 was substantially better in the early Spring of 2005.  All of the qualities we esteem in music reproduction, from pace and rhythm to bass extension to midrange openness, and including absence of grain and harshness, were areas in which the L53 did well.  If the unit had been marketed strictly as a 50 watt integrated amplifier, I would have been impressed.  It’s quieter than the 3020, at least in its old age, smoother and more musical, and twice as powerful.
          
First the L53 drove the Edgar Slimline 80, a three-way horn system.  Of course, you don’t need much power to drive this speaker to excessive levels, but the amp needs to be extremely quiet and free of high frequency nastiness.  While the NAD didn’t provide the lushness and detail of my SAS 7.0 single-ended amp, it wasn’t embarrassed in the comparison.  The Slimline, which exposes errors to a painful degree, is a tough test.
          
My other reference speaker is a pair of stacked Quad 57s, and they can show up amplifier faults in painfully short order.  The L53 passed this test with a reactive, insensitive load, too.  It lacked the authority of the new Monarchy 250-watt hybrid, and the unsurpassed combination of power and musical definition of the VAC 70/70, but it wasn’t far away.  Plainly, all 50-watt amps are not constructed equally. 
 
E Pluribus Unum
          
I was wrong, and that’s good.  Still, the doubt remained: if the amplifier is this good, how much could I expect of the other components packed into the box?
          
The CD/DVD player works well.  Like the integrated amp section, I feel this portion of the L53 is very competent, with properly chosen priorities resulting in good sound and vision.  You would certainly have to spend a great deal more to hear or see an improvement.  I plugged a $1,500 CD player into the back and didn’t hear any revelatory differences.  The image cast on my Sony monitor was clear and crisp.
          
The L53’s FM tuner is quite good; about as much better than my old NAD 4020 tuner than the amp beats my old 3020.  Reception is stronger – I was able to pull in Chicago stations more easily – but, much more to the point, the sound was more musical.  For those of you who have never heard of the 4020, this was a celebrated unit because of its innovative Schotz tuning circuit.  Some of the improvement, of course, has to do with the intrinsic virtue of having all of your electronic eggs in one basket: no interconnects means no RCAs, no power cables generating hum and leaking noise.  And, as I said, the amp is pretty darn good.  The tuner’s single failing was the inability to cancel out announcers: “We’ll hear a wonderful recording of Beethoven’s A minor quartet in a moment, but first I want to drone on about my opinions, impressions and amateurish notions.”  Well, you can’t expect to get everything for six hundred dollars.
          
The AM tuner opened a world of hip-hop, rap, country-western rendered with compressed dynamics; lengthy advertising segments, public announcements and sports reports.  I consign self-important FM classical announcers to lengthy AM listening sessions.
          
The amplifier has only two channels, but don’t despair: the L53 contains an SRS system, to simulate a wide ambience and restore signal lost in recording.  After three days of listening to music I engaged the SRS and found that the bass and treble were enhanced to unnatural and irritating levels.  Employed as intended on movies, however, SRS does make the dialogue easier to follow, and to widen the sound stage.  It does not do the job of five or seven large, properly placed loudspeakers and a subwoofer.
          
That, ultimately, is the point of the exercise: not to extend the state of the art but to push against the law of diminishing returns.  There are better components in every category, but they all cost a great deal more money, occupy vast amounts of space, and require upkeep.  NAD has put as much sound quality as I could imagine, and more features, into a small box.  It’s cheap, will doubtless last decades, and performs almost any function you could ask.  Buy one for the office, another for the study, send your kid to college with one; and be thankful that the NAD engineering and marketing people are as wise now as they were thirty years ago.
          
 - H. Richard Weiner

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