Impressions on the NAD M51

Well I've had my NAD M51 for over a week so far using it everyday and I figured I'd post up some impressions and opinions on the DAC. First I will say that my unit is a factory (NAD) refurbished which saved a few hundred bucks on the unit. I ordered it from SpearIt Sound up in Massachusetts and they were top notice professional throughout the whole ordering process and are an authorized NAD Dealer. Upon arrival, I have to say I had all the factory boxes (double boxed) with the NAD sealed tape across...

Finally the weather returned to reasonable temperatures and I'm able to get going again. Tries Ron's 80 grit on a piece of plywood method of flattening the top facet. Worked great except for nicking a corner and rounding it over. Would have been ally of sanding to fix, so I set up the vacuum rig. Veneer wrapped perfectly along the rounded edge until... Power outage. No power, no vacuum. My band clamps are 2 hours away. So I came up with this, hoping the bag and breather would provide some flexibility...

Here's my Well Tempered Simplex rebuild. We've renamed it the WT "Complex."

Bought it as just a plinth with motor and bearing off eBay, adapted WTRP bearing, spindle and platter purchased off eBay to it by building a lower base. Moved the squash ball feet to the lower base, bought an AC adapter, built the arm and arm suspension, counterweight, arm rest and designed 3 parts that a friend printed 3D for me. Originally tried to adapt the 5-pin DIN plug to the plinth that WT Lab...

For the piano black finish.....get ready. This is quite a bit of work. Made MUCH easier with the right tools...but is a bit of bear regardless. Total time took over a month for me including all my orders/lessons learned/and actual finishing. With a second go-round, I bet I could do it over 3-4 weeks only working on weekends. Biggest part is drying time. Figure a day for final sanding/polishing/installing components for the pair.

I tried to do it the poor man's way, but it was exhausting...

Having been an extremely frugal music listener-mainly due to financial reasons-it has been difficult throughout the years to satisfy my want of good sound. I've typically either bought used gear, waited for something to pop up on the interweb, or used various employee discounts to buy the next piece of the audio nirvana pie. Thus it was outside my typical comfort zone when I purchased a brand new pair of Magnepan 1.7s two months ago. For that story, see this thread:

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The Bond Collection is a collectible box set featuring 22 James Bond films on Blu-ray. Collection includes the films of course, but also includes more than 130 hours of bonus features including never-before-seen content from the Bond archives. There are 9 titles available on Blu-ray for the first time ever! These are Goldeneye, Octopussy, The Spy Who Loved Me, You Only Live Twice, The Living Daylights, Tomorrow Never Dies, anDiamonds are Forever, A View to a Kill and On Her Majesty’s ...

Today, I received my new Pioneer Elite FD62 blu Ray player. The build quality is in fact, very average, as honestly I expected for a retail $400.00 player. It's very lightweight and has a small footprint. Image quality seems pretty good out of the box, I have not done any adjustments. I have watched Knight and Day partially on projector, and partially on my 59" plasma. Both seemed reasonably good. There was some pixelization visible on both displays with this player. Some of this could be...