NAD C 658

You have to feel for whoever is in charge of box-ticking in the product design chain of a music streamer. The range of desirable features available gets ever wider as more services, codecs and technologies continue to work their way into the vast and volatile world of streaming.

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With the NAD C 658 priced at the more premium end of the market, you would expect it to tick off most of them, which it does. A streamer, DAC and preamp combination, this NAD is a real Swiss Army knife of a hi-fi component.

The C 658 uses the BluOS streaming platform, which was developed for Bluesound kit and has since expanded to other brands within the Lenbrook parent company, such as NAD.

Futureproof design

The platform and its accompanying BluOS app is an access point for many streaming music and radio services, including Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, HDTracks, Napster, TuneIn Radio and iHeartRadio. It can also access local and networked music, supporting files up to 32-bit/192kHz and including MQA, of which more than 250,000 tracks can be indexed.

It facilitates multi-room pairing with any other player in the BluOS ecosystem, and boasts another form of multi-room and streaming for Apple devices courtesy of AirPlay 2.

We think that this app – available on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac OS phones, tablets and computers – sets a real benchmark for streaming platforms.

The BluOS app is easy to operate and nicely designed. It’s reliably responsive too; even switching from songs in one music service to another or to a local library is smooth.