Hmm, I thought that I had previously posted on this thread (hence my getting an email reminder for updates to the thread) but somehow my earlier, inoffensive, post seems to have vanished ...
Let's see if this post survives. This isn't a complaint againt this great-sounding NAD M28 amplifier specifically, but against all 7-channel amplifiers. Assume that you have a great deal of money, and a reasonable, though not endless, amount of space in your AV cabinet. You want to move beyond the previous standard of a 7.1.4 system to the new standard (which Mr Withers himself has at home) of 9.2.6. You have a 16-channel processor like the
Lygndorf MP-60 or the
Arcam AVR30 (which has seven Class G amplifier channels). My concern here wouldn't be the two subwoofers, but the nine base channels plus the six Atmos channels. Those come to 15 channels. And my point is that using seven-channel amplifiers, it's not possible to get to 15 channels with only one further box. If you used the Arcam, with its seven built-in channels, you still need eight more channels, which using seven-channel power amplifiers means two more boxes, or three in total. And using the Lyngdorf, with no built-in amplification, to get to 15 power channels entails using three seven-channel power amplfiers, or four boxes in total. Which is kinda a lot of boxes ... However, I guess that you could stick with three boxes in total even using the Lyngdorf processor by using this NAD amplifer for the base layer and then using something like the
Emotiva XPA-11 (or its nine-channel version the XPA-9) for the other channels. Perhaps 8-channel separate power amplifiers might become more common in due course as we go beyond 7.1.4 systems.