NAD Reliability

I've had an issue with the M25 amp - sound's great, had to replace the power supply. The M15 pre/pro just quit working one day. Haven't fixed it.

I can tell you I just bought a new M3 and investigated it heavily, including several calls to NAD. I think the key is to where it is designed, and what level of QC the designing manufacturer is holding the plant to. Many North American major audio and smaller audio companies are building in China. Probably some that we do not readily know of. I during my search, discussed with another audio company, thier expensive integrated amp, and it being made in China. His feeling was that designed in North America, built in China with the right quality control, is as good as being built anywhere else.

My Mac preamp had a volume control failure within 5 years, so everything can fail.

But back to NAD and the M3. That is an NAD design in Canada with proprietary NAD items, not a China design rebadged like some of the audio products showing up. Of all the Dealers I talked to, there have been few problems overall on the M3 from what I gathered. There were some early problems with the M55/M5 I guess, but that was resolved. If I am not mistaken Mac had issues with it's 201 SACD player, and Rega had issues with some of it's CD players , so again nobody is immune.

I did a lot of research into products, failures, performance etc. What I found was of the 4 or 5 integrated amps I researched on, not one of them had a clean record. By that I mean, complaints of failure or flawed sonics of one type or another shows up on all of them, including the NAD M3. There is always some complaint or issue on all. So I found you have to take it all with a grain of salt and make your best decision.

All this said and done, I'll post on how well I like my M3 in the following days, and how it works and sounds.

Actually from what I understand since Lenbrook industries bought out the other owners (NAD was had several owners at one point) in 2001 reliability and quality have gone up. Their new offerings in the 2 channel area (classic series) are very nice. I have only heard of one instance of someone having and issue with an M3, that is one nice integrated. NAD has it's own factories in China, so you have critical oversight. So NAD designs it's gear in Canada and then builds it in it's factories in China. Nad was one of the first companies to design in the west and assemble in the east. Things are much different from the days when you dropped off your designs to an OEM and they did their work. I would buy the M3 with confidence and compare it's build quality and sound to amps in it's price range.

Thanks for the updates and insight !

I had an NAD receiver about 5 years ago and it gave me a ton of trouble with one of the amps. Even though it was under warranty, I had to fight with NAD to finally replace the receiver since they couldn't fix it after 3 trips to the service center and having it shipped to them. The new one has worked perfectly since and a friend is still using it. I was very dissappointed by the hassle and hoops that I had to jump through to get this thing straightened out that I vowed to never own another NAD product again. I will say that it did sound excellent.