NAD Electronics (NAD originally was an acronym for New Acoustic Dimension) is a Canadian producer of low-cost home audiophile amplifiers and components owned by the Lenbrook Group of Pickering, Ontario, Canada. Its most famous product is the late-1970s NAD 3020 amplifier, designed by Bjørn Erik Edvardsen, which became a staple of low-budget Hi-Fi in Britain, where the company was originally founded in London by Martin Borish.

The company's philosophy is to include only genuinely useful features and leave out flashing lights and seldom used buttons, leading to an understated elegance to the products (see picture) when compared with typical Japanese designs, for example. Another important philosophy is to use leading-edge designers but to contract in most cases lower-cost manufacturers on a product-by-product basis, typically in Asia. This allows truly innovative and high-quality products that can be sold at very competitive prices. This price to quality advantage was greatly diminished when outsourcing production to Asia became the norm rather than the exception.

One area where NAD is notable for its innovation is in amplifier design where their small and affordable amplifiers are well regarded for delivering very high fidelity and an extremely “musical” sound with power capabilities typical of much larger and more expensive amplifiers. The keys to this achievement are: (1) an innovative approach to the design of the power supply feeding the amplifier and (2) the inclusion of a user-defeatable Soft-Clipping circuit.

Power-supply design

NAD focuses on the concept of “effective power” and its amplifiers have been known for delivering generous headroom, meaning that they can deliver dynamic power bursts far in excess of their rated RMS power. The key to this feature is to use a flexible power supply which stores significant reserve current for quick release at moments of high musical load. The various incarnations of this design have been associated with different names over the years including Power Envelope and recently PowerDrive. Additional benefits of this approach include the fact that amplifiers using this technology can handle complex, real-life, lower-impedance loudspeaker loads as compared with the simple 8-ohm resistor typically used to calculate advertised power ratings and the fact that the circuitry in this approach requires less cooling, while maintaining ability to handle complex impedance loads as low as 2 ohms.

Clipping protection

An amplifier that is overdriven, or pushed beyond its designed power capabilities, produces audible distortion known as clipping by cutting off extremes of the music waveform, resulting in harshly unpleasant sound and threatening damage to speakers, particularly tweeters. NAD amplifiers incorporate a user-defeatable "Soft-Clipping" circuit to address this issue. It gently transforms the music waveform as the point of clipping approaches, the goal being clearer reproduction and simultaneous protection of speakers.

External links

• NAD official website
• NAD - classical receiver 120, 140 160, 300 (German)