Ah, a NAD lover......i pushed your button.....he he. Thank you for your intelligent and well thought out reply. All audio companies care about the sound. So, Yes, they care about the sound.......as I said...(slightly)....relative to what is possible.....the serious tweak level. If they cared about the serious tweak level then they would hire someone like me and the products would be as expensive as the wild stuff out there. At the level they are playing at they may be among the best, or the best and also the best value. They are not state of the art.....remember, this is the What's Best Forum. There is no way a NAD amp can compete with the big boys......Gryphon, Aries Cerat, MSB, D'Agostino, etc., EVS modified Purifi amps....he he. We shall see where my amps are. But they will be way, way above a STOCK NAD. They cannot do the hand made tweakiness, they are not using discrete regulators, and discrete input stages, exotic connectors, audiophile fuses, hand made wires listened to for directionality......they simply cannot do this at the price points they sell. They would make no money. This is true for most every "normal" manufacturer in that price range.
The M33 is a do it all machine......it streams, it DACs, it preamps, it amps, it pours coffee....it gives you a massage. It is not expensive and it may be the best all in one for the money. NAD themselves does not mention preamp circuitry, power supply circuitry, use of exotic super transparent parts, etc. etc. THEY KNOW what they are doing. They know the level at which they are playing......they might just be the bad boys of cheap. But they cannot complete on the Big Boys circuit. You cannot squeeze every ounce out of the Purifi module unless you mod it....and unless you use the most pure simple input stage using the worlds best regulators and power supplies and have most of the edge connectors bypassed , etc, etc, into infinity. There is normal.....and there is tweak. NAD is normal.....they ain't tweak. I am not saying NAD products do not sound good....they probably sound very good......but at the tweak level....or super tweak level? Not happening.
The Mola Mola Kaluga amps......are slightly tweak. Bruno hardwired the output wires, he changed the caps on the output to some Monolithic ones, he modified the power supply and output stage slightly.....use his own discrete input stage, etc. On the tweak scale......I would say a 45 out of 100. My modified NC1200 amps would be around 85 on the tweak scale. My amps will be around $4300 for mono blocks and the Mola Mola are $16.5K. My amps will have the 3000 watt power supplies (with some mods)....not the 1200 watters in the Mola Mola. My amps have options to use any and all of the discrete input op amps currently in production. My NC1200 modules will be modded with large gauge air core coils and modified caps, etc. Hand made tweaking is just not possible at low cost production line manufacturing......just not. However, you cannot make a lot of money doing what i am doing. What I am doing is an art.....a super small cottage industry thang. I can only modifiy 2 amps a week. If this goes how I hope then I imagine a waiting list will start to form very soon.
Everything I do to the Purifi amps I have done before.....except...one very important thing. And that is the air core coils......Every single class D amp that you have heard (except maybe the Merrill's) has ferrite core coils. Every single speaker manufacturer of serious high end speakers knows that ferrite core coils sonically suck when used in the xover on the mids and highs. So, why would you want to run the entire signal through a ferrite core coil? The very last thing the signal goes through before it leaves a class D amp is this coil. So, the sound will never get any better than the distortions of the coil. The distortions of a ferrite core foil are quite audible.......when you hear them removed you now realize that Class D is way better than you ever thought. You will see manufacturers in the future start to adopt air core coils....once the word gets out about the transparency of my modded amps.