Tunaman, I'd be interested in your M5 before you turn it into a lamp LOL. Also, a few people have suggested finding a competent tech to look at the M3, I agree with that. I'll tell you my experiences with several NAD pieces, along with plenty of other brands of gear. If you find a NAD piece that is made in Japan, that's the good gear in general. The stuff coming out of Taiwan and now China typically is populated with "cheap" electrolytic capacitors, and they fail plain and simple. Your power supply in the M3 is most likely a switching power supply, (I haven't looked at the service manual) which NAD would not have a drop in replacement for now, hence their response to you, but a competent technician or engineer "should" be able to rebuild that power supply. I have a beautiful M5 that sounds incredible (yes, the NAD gear does tend to sound great when working) and when I received it the unit was dead. The standby LED would not even turn on. I opened it, headed straight to the switching power supply (this one powers the digital and logic portion of the unit, and also the brains of course) and guess what I found? Several bad electrolytic caps. In a switching power supply some of those electrolytic caps are working very hard, being constantly exposed to switching pulses in the range of 10's to 100's of kHz. If they are cheap caps, they will fail, plain and simple. When they failed in my unit they also took out a diode unfortunately. I replaced all of them with good quality capacitors, and replaced the diode, and I now have a unit that is quite reliable, will last longer than it did new, and it sounds excellent too. If you really like your M3, don't give up yet. Also, NAD's response is not surprising to me, they would rather sell you a new piece than keep and old one running. They are not the only company out there that does that. Good luck. If you are anywhere near the SF Bay area (south bay) I would be happy to take a look at your M3. I don't do this for a living, I'm an engineer with a great career and job, audio is a passion for me, not a living LOL.
Nad M3 non repairable
Hi, dumb question , my Nad M3 has a blown power board, and parts are unavailable and the shop says it's not worth fixing. The case is beautiful and I hate to throw it away. What else could I do with it besides make a lamp?