NAD Masters Series M33
On the cold and sunny morning of February 19, 2020, a dozen or so audio critics and writers gathered at Gilmore’s Sound Advice on New York’s far West Side to see some new NAD and DALI products that had been unveiled the prior month at CES. It was a friendly group, and we kibitzed over coffee before clustering in the arranged seats for presentations and auditions. I doubt any of us realized that it would be the last time for the foreseeable future that we would experience this familiar rite.
I vividly recall walking back to Times Square with John Atkinson while talking about amplifiers and expressing how impressed I was with the NAD M33 from its specs and the demo. He had reviewed the M32,1 with its optional MDC DD BluOS module and “DirectDigital” topology, and more recently, the M102 with integrated BluOS and “Hybrid Digital” amplifier. Both of those amps were NAD developments, with the former accepting a digital signal at its input while the latter requires an analog input.
The new M33 seems like the culmination of this progression, with a fully integrated BluOS streaming platform, sophisticated control and input/output options, and new power amplifiers based on a patent-pending class-D technology developed by Bruno Putzeys, the mind behind today’s almost ubiquitous nCore power amplifiers.
At Munich High End 2019 in May of last year, NAD “announced that it will be the first international brand to incorporate and launch Purifi’s new patent-pending class-D technology into its product family. The amplifier circuit, known as (meaning “self-clocking”), is
