Not convinced about the Nad D1050 dac

audiovector

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Greetings from Sweden!

Yesterday i bought a Nad D1050 usb dac and hooked it up to my setup consisting of a HK 970 amp and B&W dm603 s1 speakers. As soon as I started to listen, I noticed a significant and unpleasent "glare" in the upper midrange region, especially noticeable with certain voices. I tried to correct this with eq but just didn't get rid of this annoying "sound knife" in the midrange tones. Now I'm wondering if this in general is a typical sound characteristic of Nad products or if it may be that this dac just dosen't match soundwise with the other components of my system? Do any of you guys recognize this problem or know a solution for it?

Many thanks
 
Listen to what and how? Cd, streamer, PC....?
If listening to music stored on PC, ext hdd or nas, what format are they in? Lossless (flac, wav alac), or lossy (MP3)
 
Listen to what and how? Cd, streamer, PC....?
If listening to music stored on PC, ext hdd or nas, what format are they in? Lossless (flac, wav alac), or lossy (MP3)

Mostly house music on Spotify 320 kbit/s via macbook pro usb port.
 
And so what dac did you use before?. I'm taking all your digital sources go through the Nad dac including cd etc.
Also what do you mean by glare.
 
And so what dac did you use before?. I'm taking all your digital sources go through the Nad dac including cd etc.
Also what do you mean by glare.

I didn't use any dac before this one so I haven't compared it to any other but I do know good sound and this dac is a bit of a rebellion compared to other elements of my system thats for sure.
 
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I suppose a miss match maybe. I'm not sure what you mean by glare but take some advice from a dealer on matching I guess and always trial at home before you buy, if you didn't already. You could get the same results if you change speaker cables etc. You may be just referring to the balance of the treble which can be adjusted with cables.
 
Update

After a couple weeks of burning in, the emphasis in the upper midrange has tuned down to an acceptable level. In my taste it's still to emphasised to be comfortably listened to on high volumes. It's more noticeble on some tracks than other, and actually, in general it's worse with manly voices. However, despite this drawback I'm pretty satisfied with the dac altogether, although the curiosity to test other dacs e.g. the arcam rdac or irdac is there.
 
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