NAD Masters M33 -- first review

[Flashman]

I too owned a NAD M2 and loved it until I bought the 440 Pro. I also own an NAD M17v2 as my surround processor which feeds into the 440 for the front speakers and has Dirac Live (Full Frequency) and BlueOS built in. These two technologies which NAD push as being amazing, I was really excited about trying but ultimately was left disappointed.

Others may have had a different experience but for me after spending hours and hours with the microphone trying to setup Dirac Live multiple times it always ended up giving me a bass light profile and frustratingly you cannot tweak the settings yourself afterwards. It's a case of Dirac knows best and if you don't like it, then that's tough! More surprisingly and less of an issue for 2 channel listening was also the fact that if you add Atmos height speakers to your system it turns off Dirac Live and it cannot be used all.

On the BluOS front it didn't sound as good as using AIR directly to the Devialet or as good as using my Auralic Aries streaming bridge so ultimately was used for one listening session and then abandoned. Maybe things have improved over the past couple of years but the M33 is going to have to have much improved versions of these technologies and be absolutely outstanding to be be Devialet beater.

For me, the attraction is primarily the first mass adoption of Purifi technology.  If that doesn't match or beat the Devialet SQ then all is for naught.  Second reason would be DiracLive room correction.  Finally, not to raise a ruckus here, it'd be nice to have full MQA implementation.  As for BluOS, I would run the amp with Roon and not bother with it.