Review: NAD 3020 Receiver


Category: Amplifiers

I heard this receiver for a few years and it is a good economical starting point for this exciting hobby (bordering on art if you will). Hooked up to a good cd player like panasonic MASH technology employing unit, and a good pair of bookshelf like polk, niles audio, mission, tannoy, etc., midfi can be surprisingly affordable. For students and new comers of this quest for sonic heaven, it is a good starting place that will give you years of enjoyment B-4 gaining that itch to upgrade again and again as your ear develops like an artist. Forgive me if I seem condescending - I know there are many who are far further down the road in this hobby - I think the purpose of reviews are to inform and advise, so I am doing simply that.

The receiver has a full and rich sound, and a warm character. Although one can talk about many specs, the important thing for me is that you the listener has to like the "character" of the amp. I came across excellent big names in audio that didn't quite move me because I didn't like the color of the sound or the character of the amp. Upscale Yamahas have good specs, but never moves me, and they are units costing thousands of dollars. "You get what you pay for" does not apply here - one can come across even affordable Japanese units that will do it for you, and you can spend thousands without hitting that aesthetical pleasure/artistic mark that we are all seeking. So, my advice is to hear many units before deciding, and "let your ears be the judge."

I would definitely recommend this begginer's unit because of the dynamic quality - music is satisfying and punchy because of NAD's ability to momentarily deliver more power. NAD's 20 watts is differnt than shelf unit's 20 or even 50 watts.
Please invest in better cables - buying good products and not using better cables than the supplied one's is defeating the purpose of choosing good products - might as well buy exec shelf units. Teac, yamaha, denon,aiwa,and sony offers pretty good sounding systems - I wouldn't call it a musical experience though. With this receiver, and doing homework with magazines like "What-Hifi" buyer's report, www.audioreview, and auditioning many products, you can assemble a surprisingly satisfying mid-fy for less than $1000. Do look in www.ebay.com in electronic section for bargains. Let me give you a few brand names I respect - mission speakers (dark sound), niles audio os line (beautiful tweeter if you like soprano, flute),polk rt series ( unfatiguing comfortable laid back polite sound), klipsch (neo dymium tweeter gives alive sound - once you hear neo dymium magnets, you'll never go back ) although klipschs are not recommended for classical - too soft spring in the woofer ). Cd players are vital as well. Choose one that has a rich deep musical tone. Panasonic and Technic uses MASH technology allowing for the best sounding entry level units (under $200). For cables, monsters are ok but there are better ones out there for a little more money. If I have one complaint about the NAD, it is that it's not black sounding meaning it's noisy. In amps like Adcom, sounds of gold rises from silence to please our ears and more, but NAD has background noise that is not bad for the first hour, but eventually tiring (only at loud volumes). If you do extensive loud listening, perhaps this is not for you. Again, hear it for your self, and see if you would like to live with this musical instrument ( the character I mean ) - quite rich and warm.

Associated gear
Polk r series book shelf, Nakamichi CD player and cassett player

Similar products
Sony, onkyo, sansui, marantz
gonglee3
Older NADs 1980s have warmer sound, and the newer ones are faster. Give me warmth over fast - for my taste.
While delving through some old archive material on audio I came across a review on the NAD 3020 from The Audio Critic, Volume 2 Number 2 - Summer/Fall 1979. The report was titled-"A Genuine Breakthrough in Inexpensive Integrated Amplifiers". Model tested was sr # 3225220 on loan from NAD. Price $175.00. Two Year Warranty. The following is the review and I quote.

It looks unassuming rather than cheap-a simple black box with a full complement of controls,including bass and treble, as well as a five-LED peak power indicator monitoring for both channels and displaying the higher output at any instant. The LED'S are labeled 1,5,10,20 and 35 watts into 8 ohms,the last is about 2 1/2 dB above the obviously ultra conservative 20/20 watt continuous power rating.

The unit came to us very highly recommended, so we threw the toughest test at it right up front. With a variety of speaker systems, we A-B-ed it against our very best pre amp/power amp combination, the Cotter System 2 feeding the Rapport Amp-1.(The latter has meanwhile become extinct.)The price ratio of A and B in this test was roughly 15 to 1. Well, what can we tell you? Everyone who was listening agreed that the NAD wasn't as good. Everyone also agreed that the difference was amazingly small. Both signal paths sounded clean, transparent, unstrained and musical. The NAD 3020 had a somewhat less open, neutral and finely detailed sound; it clipped a bit sooner;nevertheless it wasn't really a let down to switch to it because it was completely free of the hard "electronic" quality of most transistor amplifiers, cheap or expensive. If the Cotter/Rapport combination hadn't been available then and there as a reference, the NAD would have been accepted as just right-that's how good it is. By itself, it's difficult to fault it in clarity, smoothness and just plain accuracy.

We were able to make further and more detailed listening comparisons, since the 3020 can be separated into it's preamp and power amp sections via jacks in the rear. Thus it can be inserted into a reference system either as a preamp or power amp and A-B-ed against others. What we found out about it that is equally impressive. The preamp section ranks just below the top five or six separate preamplifiers we have tested so far at any price! and doesn't sound dramatically inferior to any of them. It never gets hard or overbright and is just a tad short of the ultimate in transparency. If the RIAA equalization were more accurate we could almost begin to talk about "Reference B" quality. As it is the error curve drops to -1dB at 20Hz,bunps up to + 0.2dB at 430 Hz, and shows a gradual decline above 1 kHz, down to - 0.7 db at 20 kHz in one channel, - 0.4 dB in the other. Not to bad, but not excellent. The power amplifier by itself is perhaps even more remarkable; next to the Hafler DH 200, for example, it sounds a little compressed and less open,but smoother and sweeter, without any trace of that hard glint on top. In other words, it isn't totally surpassed by the Hafler, which in turn is surpassed by only six or seven other power amps known to us, at any price. For a $175.00 amplifier with a free preamp thrown in,that's not bad at all.

The subjective perceived dynamic headroom of the 3020 can be increased by switching in the "soft cliiping" feature, of which NAD appears to be inordinately proud. In our opinion, this is a double edged gimmick that takes some of the unpleasantess out of frequent clipping when the amplifier is being pushed but also impairs the depth and three dimensional detail of the reproduced sound. Our rating of the NAD 3020 is based on it's sonic quality with the soft clipping switch in the off position.

The most interesting question, of course, is how NAD is able to do so much for so little. What do they know that others don't? New Acoustic Dimension is an international organization, originally founded and financed by a group of dealers, with offices in several countries and production facilities in Taiwan. Being dealer-based gives them a realistic outlook on consumer needs; having access to reasonably skilled labor at relatively low cost gives them an edge in price. The 3020 isn't built like a Mark Levinson amplifier but uses parts of fairly decent quality in all the important places and makes a few compromises wherever the penalty is tolerable. The designer of the entire line is Bjorn-Erik Edvardsen, a Norwegian now living in London,who has some very strong convictions about spending the available production budget on sound rather that cosmetics and sales features. He also seems to have a set of highly intelligent and effectual priorities in circuit design,giving us further evidence in support of our long-standing conviction that good thinking costs no more than bad thinking.

We were fascinated to find, for example,that the 3020 is not only bandwidth-limited to reject infrasonic and ultra-sonice garbage but also happens to use high-pass and low-pass characteristics that are very similiar to those of the state-of-the-art Cotter NFB-2 filter/buffer. Not that the Cotter filter's highly sophisticated time-domain correction is entirely duplicated, but the magnitude of the low-frequency roll-off is about the same and the measured rise time of 9 microseconds is exactly the same. What a coinidence and what a corroboration! DC-to-light freaks eat your hearts out. Correctly bandwidth-limited systems simply sound better. Large output transistors that are coasting most of the time, not much feedback, a very carefully designed power supply, and no current limiting protective circuitry are some of the plausible reasons of the 3020's sonic success. Without any allowance for its low price, this must be considered a thoroughly modern amplifier, designed with total awareness of errors of the past and obviously capable of handling complex speaker loads with aplomb. We're impressed beyond our wildest expectations.

The one thing that remains to be seen is whether or not the NAD 3020 will perform as impressively after years of heavy use as it does when it's new. We gave our sample as much of a beating as we could and found no change taking place, but we can't make any unqualified promises. It just isn't a mil-spec amplifier. It would be a pity, though, if all the $1,000.00 preamps and $1,000.00 power amps that are better built but don't sound nearly as a good outlived it to pollute the ears of our children. End Review/End Quote.

So here we are some 25 years after the introduction of the NAD 3020. While I no longer have my 3020 due to FP&L frying the 3020 with a power surge, I do have the 3120, which is the same unit sans the tone controls and LED'S. I can attest that the peformance has remained faithful all these years. This unit along with the NAD 4020 Tuner now occupy my office at work. Everyday I have to chase staffers out of the office, so I can get some work done! My reference system at home is my Forte Class A system. Yes it is better that the 3120. But the funny thing is, I have yet to get tired of listening to the 3120 and apparently my co-workers don't either.

Truly this is a product that has stood the test of time and has remained faithful. It just doesn't get much better than this. No wonder this has in the ensuing years become an icon in audio.
Hello:

Having owned a NAD 3020 integrated 20wpc amplifier and having compared it against costlier equipment (ADCOM - Musical Fidelity - VTL) has convinced me that NAD is really special. It's also a slap in the face of those designers and manufacturer who are constantly pushing up prices way ahead of honest improvement in performance. NAD 3020 is amazing. Mine has driven Celestion A-2, Acoustic Research AR3a, ADS L400 and JBL 4311 and with every speaker surprisingly good sound was consistently reproduced. Even after 24 years of use! Long live NAD !

Improving it? Set Softclipping switch to off and if you like your music not too loud or do your listening in a small room, use amp lab-in. Also, polarize power plug. By the way discard those factory "U" jumpers between pre-out and amp-in and plug Audioquest interconnects instead. You are in for a surprise!

Happy listenings
I somehow missed reading the review Ferrari posted, thanks for doing that, it was sure an interesting read!
I went shopping back in 1981 for a stereo system, then Bryn Mawr Stereo (Tweeter now) recommended an NAD 7020, Mission 700's and a phillips turntable. After bringing it home and setting up I threw on A Dave Brubeck cut which started with a solo Piano intro. Both my Mom and sister came from different parts of the house wondering who the hell was playing the piano, the sound was that good. That system. for less than $500, was truly a classic. Absolutely outstanding sound.