Integrated Amp Reviews

Once you're used to the remote, it's easy to find the Volume and Mute controls in the dark—a remote's most important feature, in my opinion. But the remote is multifunction, designed, apparently, to control a range of NAD components, which means it's busier than it needs to be if you use it to control only the C 372. It doesn't seem to be programmable. In an all-NAD system, the remote's versatility would probably be appreciated, but it wouldn't work with my Marantz SA-15 SACD player, so for me, the extra complexity was a mild annoyance.

Listening
What's inside the NAD C 372 matches what's outside: it's all business. If you're looking for an amplifier that will add a touch of richness to the sound of your system, you should probably look elsewhere. But if you seek a neutral, feature-rich integrated that delivers the music with plenty of power and resolution with no troubling noise or significant sonic defects, the C 372 might be just what you're looking for. The fact that, at $899, it's also cheap by audiophile standards is merely a bonus.

In this most important part of the review, I find myself with little to say. Driven by the C 372, my speakers went as deep as they ever go, and as high. The C 372 was not the least bit tube-like, yet the sound had plenty of body, and the images it produced were dense and corporeal while also being precisely located in space. I heard none of the added richness and—I thought—slightly blunted transients provided by the Exposure 2010S integrated. The transient, metallic character of Sir Roland Hanna's Bösendorfer piano on the first nine tracks of Swing Me No Waltzes (CD, Storyville)—which went missing during the listening for my Follow-Up review of the Exposure in the January 2006 issue—was restored through the C 372. The presentation was spacious but not especially airy. There was a lovely sense of ease to the sound. The C 372 was dead quiet; there was no detectable noise through my 86dB-efficient Vandersteen 2Ce Signature speakers at any volume setting, and I could detect no spurious sounds between the notes.

The C 372 resolved everything I played through it to the limits my speakers and room allow—which is to say, I've never heard better resolution from these speakers with any other amplifier. Those of you who must share space with others, or who have neighbors and thin walls, will be happy to know that the C 372 sounded good at low volumes, and that its headphone section drove my Sennheiser HD 650s just fine. The C 372's tone controls alter the character of the sound delicately enough to be useful—a tweak of the Treble control could tame a bright recording—and if you don't want to use them you can remove them from the circuit path.

I feel I ought to say something critical about the C 372; otherwise, the folks on the Internet discussion groups are likely to take me to task. I haven't yet heard an amplifier that makes acoustic music sound acoustic—any kind of music I've ever heard reproduced electrically sounds electrically reproduced. The C 372 was no exception. It's a clean, quiet amplifier, but it is an amplifier and it sounds like one.

I also detected, or thought I did, a slight channel imbalance; images were pulled just a little to the right of where I was used to hearing them. This could be fixed, of course, with a slight adjustment of the Balance control, and in any case I could be wrong about it. We'll see what John Atkinson's measurements reveal. Perhaps a better system in a better room would have revealed flaws in this amplifier's sonic presentation that I couldn't detect. Then again, maybe not.

Getting what you need
As I look back over what I've written about the NAD C 372, I worry that my choice of modifiers— neutral, lacking character—might not do it justice. Reading between the lines, people might conclude that I didn't particularly like this integrated, which isn't true. I liked it very much.

John Marks has written that sometimes a component just sounds right. I haven't had that experience—not in connection with a piece of hardware, anyway—but I know what he means. My own reference point is writing: It's hard work, you do your best, and sometimes it comes out right— really right—and that's special. But that alignment of the stars doesn't happen very often, and one of the few bits of wisdom I've acquired in 42 years is that it's foolish to try to force them to align, whether with colored foils, plastic chips, scotch, or what have you. In audiophilia as in life, the best approach is to make good, smart choices, remain skeptical but open-minded, trust your own ears but not too much—and hope that every now and then the gods smile on you. But it isn't particularly healthy to live for that fix from day to day.

It's all about being a basically rational person who believes in the value of a hard day's work but who also believes that, even if it's uncommon, there are such things as, say, art, music, or love. Audio, which has elements of all three, requires a lot of sweat over the long term. Sure, we crave those transcendent moments, but ultimately you come to value the sweat as much as the stars.

The NAD C 372 is not an aligner of stars, nor did I expect it to be. It's arguably something better: a job well done. It's one of the things you can control as you wait and hope that the stars will align. It is sufficient—entirely sufficient—and that's really saying something. There's poetry in that, too.