Arcam? Surround Receiver? Below $2000? With Dab+? You are kidding right?

This is a very important product for Cambridge, a mid high end Receiver that has to compete on the showroom floor against the likes of Denon and Arcam. The parent company being Audio Partnership has a history of excellent competitive and high quality products tegrgeted at the very discriminating review conscious UK home market.

The Cambridge Audio 551R surround sound receiver is the new little brother to the famous 650R.

Featuring 110 watts of discrete amplification and all of the connectivity, scaling and 3D readiness you could ask for, it also has an AM/FM tuner. Yay.

This is the very hot (Fukishima made ...) product of aspiration in that much sought after middle-high area of surround amplifiers ... almost silly money but actually if one has done the research and listened carefully to it as an amplifier it is the defineable top of the pile for a sub $3000 surround receiver.
Witness how many of these were pre sold to the AV Newsgroup people ... there were none available to ordinary consumers for some months as the first shipments were prepurchased by this particular group of cognoscenti.
Newsgroups are the ultimate expression of the selfsumer in the AV scene at the moment. They are very hard to subvert with conventional media ads, and any attempt at a stealth or other tactic can be met with a guerilla consumer response.
They are best persuaded with quality, service and value.
We try very hard to be good at those things ...

This is excellent. After a weekend of intense negotiation our intrepid Australian Denon Distributors have beaten the Japanese factory representatives back from the ramparts and we are able to reprice their prime Surround Receivers in the local marketplace. Apparently no photos of miscreant activities in Kings Cross were needed to blackmail them with ... this time.

The baby of Denon's receivers, the AVR1513 still packs a whollop where it counts and is a wonderful partner of a Monitor Audio BX2 surround kit.

When an entry point gem comes into CAV we are unfortunately often distracted by the silly-money-reference-level gear we are privileged enough to play with. Such was the case with much of Denon’s ’13 series. Now we’ve had a second look and what the 1713 offers for its price is amazing…

The often overlooked middle child of Denon's Thirteen series AV range. Much like Jan Brady or Lisa Simpson, the AVR2113 should not be underestimated. At its new price point it makes buying a Pionkyam Receiver just plain superfluous. Not sold by the numbers this unit maintains those basic Denon tenets of good amplification and quality digital processing circuitry. Two zones of Audio with network capabilities.

What's hot in high tech AV Receivers? The AVR2313 is hot. Red hot. I am not an impartial observer when it comes to these amplifiers, we have had a very long and very positive relationship with this product that has absolutely been able to stand the most difficult tests of a very adversarial and competitive marketplace.

One looks at this amplifier and frankly wonders wether our clients will understand why it's going to be brilliant. Just now I'm going to watch "Prometheus" with the AVR 4520 set up with the excellent Linn Majik Speakers. There is a surfeit of grip and authority even sufficient to the isobaric four ways at the front.

And we were worried that Denon were going to stop making things like this anymore. Carlton Audio Visual have this on display and demonstration through a full set of Monitor Audio Gold series loudspeakers. We took the opportunity to take some pictures of it's innards...

The SR7005 was an excellent multi function surround Receiver so this has some big boots to fill.
When I unpack a Reciever I don't even look at the front panel, rather I go straight to the back panel and the mass solidity ratios of the device. Does it have a decent power supply and a good rigid chassis? What sort of quality are the terminals? What does the fine print reveal of manufacturing origin and does it have all the Australian approvals in place?

This is the new surround big boy for those of you who may aspire to a Denon AVP/POA combination but can't do the Ferrari-esque readies.
The preamp is in the classic Marantz fashion with that retro rounded stying and aside from its totally featured HDMI 1.3 etc it is the first device to stream MPEG 4 video. It looks really good ...

Hullo to the new kid in town from NAD. Now that this is repositioned to $699 I don't believe that there is a better sound quality per dollar available from a surround amplifier than this. If you are in the loop for what a good well priced amp needs this photo will mean so much more than a manufacturer's catalogue with their Rubbish power outputs and cheap construction ... heat sinks, power supplies .. transformer ... oh yes ...

Occasionally a product impresses by its appearance, and although NAD are the anti-fashionista of Hi Fi brands they have managed to make this particular Surround Receiver look really cool in its almost overstated minimalism.
Expect a quality power suply and discrete output stage with class leading amperage delivery and a rich warm sound rather than the brittle saw toothed treble of many high profile brand Surround Amps.

Real amps need two people to unload them off the truck
Real amps have liberal use of gold plate on their speaker connections and input terminals
Real amps have massive alloy heatsinks to dissapate surplus thermal energy and output devices as big as a carpenters thumb.

Trickle down theory is a wonderful thing. In consumer electronics, it means that after the R&D Department spends big dollars on creating reference products, all the products down the line will benefit from that research. Enter the NAD 390DD, a trickle down product benefiting from all the research that went into the M2 master series digital amplifier. There is no analogue stage in this amp, everything is digital from input through to the speaker terminals.

For many audio-video-philes the surround pre processor is the object of desire for inclusion into their theatre systems, however to possess one that includes the magic numbers of DTS HD and upscaling video has unfortunately required magic numbers of cash as well.

It is very hard on the consumer when the surround decoding formats and input protocols have been changing so frequently. Many people who bought a high end one box surround amplifier a few years ago incorporating the best in component video switching and DTS decoding have been left on the wrong side of the tech development wall by Blu Ray and HDMI.