A More Ambitious Upgrade - Part 1

I've been motivated to fix up and optimise another cheap system: some discarded NAD units, almost 20 year old CD player and amplifier driving good, "boombox" speakers. Very promising early signs, tonnes of genuine dynamics in the raw state; has the usual flaws of developing a very 'dirty', unpleasant edge with steady playing - quite a bit of cleaning up and tidying to be done, but excellent potential ...

There's a NAD C 540 CDP (CD only player), 304 integrated amplifier, and Sharp boombox speakers - from a classic, modern 3 identically sized boxes with all the electronics in the middle system; the speakers have a solid bass/mid unit, rated to take 200W, so no prob's there.

As usual, all the issues are with the electronics: to start with, the full setup had a cheap but cheerful sound, at least for a while from startup, until the electronics got really a dirty tone with ongoing use. As expected, the internals are riddled with weaknesses, poor implementation details, which all have to be sorted - the unfortunate thing is that mildly ambitious units like the NAD get lots of things right, but all the leftovers then combine to drag down the potential dramatically, they often sound considerably worse than a very simple, totally unambitious sound unit, in the sense of being less "musical".

Which is a way of saying that I'm in that awkward middle stage of tweaking, where quite a number of flaws have been bypassed, lifting the standard in some aspects, but putting the remaining ones in much sharper focus - the whole now very easily produces downright unpleasant sound, :-P . Many people could give up now, saying they preferred the easier to listen to, somewhat gunked up sound of the raw units - but that would be a failure of effort, big time !!

The CDP has a pretty hopeless reader mechanism engineered, CD-Rs are a huge obstacle, sound much worse than an LP with continual crackling and popping as the error correction struggles, all my other rubbishy computer and audio CD drives handle these disks with zero audible problems. But, NAD is known for this, ;-)   - will explore some avenues here.

My other recent fiddling with cheap stuff was much easier, because so many flaws were eliminated by virtue of close integration of the electronic elements - the designers got that part right! The NADs, like nearly all of this type of electronics, have flaky elements everywhere  - and each and every one has to be tracked down to get the best out of the whole.

A couple of thoughts on current progress: can do big orchestral climaxes with greater SPL than my other recent efforts, but tonality still has some way to go; massed strings, piano and such are often not right, sweetness goes off far too quickly ...