This right here is one of my favorite movie moments. The rumbling, guttural roar of the Balrog! It's incredible! Wait, on a soundbar? Oh, movie magic exposed.
Nakamichi's sales pitch here is absolutely wild. I mean, one does not simply position a soundbar against a multi- channel audio system that costs tens of thousands of dollars. And yet, they did. So, okay, Nakamichi, if that is your real name, I'll bite. I'm gonna rip my SVS home theater apart, I'm gonna replace it with your soundbar, and I'm gonna see if maybe I could have saved myself thousands of dollars and a heck of a lot of hassle.
I'm also gonna see if I can tell you about our sponsor, Ugreen. Their 145 watt power bank is equipped with power delivery and quick charge 3.0 fast charging, along with 65 watt input and a massive 25,000 mAh battery to fulfill your on-the-go needs. Check it out at the link in the video description. I like tinkering, so I went the discreet route for my home theater.
I got some SVS ultra towers and surrounds, in-ceilings courtesy of Klipsch, and a pair of SVS subs, all wired through my walls to a Denon AV receiver. These components together cost an eye-watering 13,600 US dollars, not including the price of install, which probably sounds completely bonkers to the average consumer who's buying a $200 Bose soundbar like that one that we covered last year, but if you've spent any time on the home theater subreddit, you'll know that somehow we're still in bang for the buck territory, which is what makes Nakamichi's claims so unbelievable. I mean, who do they think they are? No, really though. Old school audio nerds are going to remember Nakamichi's history making high-end cassette and CD players with the dragon name indicating their top-of-the-line products, but.
.. That company failed to transition from analog to digital, and in 1998, they were purchased by a Chinese holding company, Grand Holdings.
Four years later, they filed for bankruptcy. In the 2000s, their shambling corpse was reanimated to sell iPod docks and portable DVD players with only modest success, and more recently, the company has returned to the high-end audio scene to focus on.
.. Soundbars. Let's see if they should have stayed buried. The first thing you're gonna notice about the Dragon when you get it is that it is huge and really heavy.
To get a sense of the scale, here's that best-selling Bose soundbar off of Amazon, and here is the Sonos Arc. It completely dwarfs them both. Now obviously these comparisons aren't entirely fair because the Dragon justifies its massive size by packing in a whopping 17 distinct drivers.
Including four that reflect off the ceiling to give you a sense of height and these nifty air motion transformer tweeters that work like an accordion Squeezing in and out to produce mid to high-end frequencies with extra clarity Supposedly, but I think we've gotten ahead of ourselves a little bit. Let's look at the rest of the package Quad subwoofers you say I mean there are dual 8-inch drivers in each of these two subwoofers But my speakers have multiple drivers in them I don't call them Three speakers this won't be the last time we see Nakamichi stretching the truth We'll come back to that But first there's the surround speakers which each feature four board drivers on the sides and an angled upward firing driver that can be Rotated towards your listening position to improve overhead audio effects these bring the total number of drivers to a whopping 31 with a circuit blowing peak power of 3000 watts thankfully you'll never actually need that much power at once because at even 50% of maximum volume we are well into Uncomfortably loud territory which means we should be able to get theater-like performance out of this package then right?
Well, what are we waiting for? Let's give it a shot Good clarity The mids feel a little empty to me.
It's a pretty big sound from a sound bar though Yeah, and I think having the nice big surrounds is great Sometimes you'll get systems where you have these small surrounds and they sound piddly whenever you have surrounding But these are big enough that you still get a similar sound all the way around you. Yeah, it's a good volume of sound Surround is okay. Yeah.
It's not as good as the HTA9's. It's not as good as a dedicated 5.1. That's beside me, that ain't behind me. The subs sound pretty good.
I will say that the subs are great. I think that the bass is punchy and it's quite musical, but the issue is that it just doesn't get that low. Let's pull up "Baby Driver" and you'll see exactly what we're talking about.
Like, did you hear that just now on the bass line, that walking downwards? It gets a little boomy at the top because it's trying to compensate for the dip where the crossover lies.
Every criticism I have of it though has to be tempered by the fact that realistically in my mind what I'm comparing it to is a system that costs several times as much. If I was comparing to something else... I wouldn't be sitting here going, "Mumm, yes, but the dip, it quite." For me, I remember when I was testing this earlier, I had listened to Your Home Theater first, and then I listened to The Dragon, and then I went, "Oh." But then I came back three days later after the weekend, listened to The Dragon first, and I was like, "This is awesome!" Switching over to my quote-unquote spoiled speakers.
You just hear this like when when there is that bass punch just like like you actually feel it Yeah, which you don't get from the Nakamichi, which is really disappointing considering. They are big subwoofer still I mean at half the volume of the ones that are here though, and you know what?
Yeah, it sounds more Natural it's a better balanced experience But at what cost? yeah, and I was gonna say in terms of the treble performance The Nakamichi is kind of awesome. Yeah, I don't really miss it like listening to just the music I was like it still sounds really really good coming back to the bass though part of the reason that it doesn't punch the way That the SVS subs do is that while Nakamichi? advertises performance down to 20 Hertz what we found was Actually closer to what 30 to 45 before it just rolls off completely yeah It's um it's really disappointing and I think it's fine to have bass that only goes that low but Be honest. Be honest about it.
If you guys want to experience these two systems side-by-side by the way We're gonna have a binaural recording that we created in collaboration with Blaine from Headphones.com And we're gonna have those in unlisted links in the video description.
It's Pretty darn good in terms of spatial performance, but I've definitely encountered better We've spent a lot of time comparing the Nakamichi Dragon to a full- fledged system. I mean they invite that comparison but let's try doing something that's a competitor of the same form factor like the Sonos Arc. Yeah, I like the Arc so I'll be interested to see how it holds up.
I just want to take this moment to acknowledge how good the I/O is. On the Nakamichi, the Sonos Arc gives you one HDMI, so you better have eARC. Nakamichi doesn't have any Wi-Fi, but it does have a bajillion inputs and outputs and it does still support Bluetooth. And what's nice is that having no microphone, while it does mean that the calibration is more manual and tedious, means that there's no support for voice assistants, which some people might see as a downer, but some people might actually consider to be a plus. Now let's listen to what the Arc can do.
Sonos is unironically a good little sound bar. It's a good little sound bar. The Nakamichi Dragon does sound better. It's worth noting I don't have a pair of Sonos speakers to throw in the back, but even the sound signature is smaller. I will say that the Sonos Sub is admirable.
It's surprisingly good for its size. Yeah, they knocked it out of the park with that. And something we've got to consider in all of this is any sound bar is only going to be as good as the limited options that you have available to expand it. Sure you can add surrounds to your Sonos as long as you're willing to overpay for them and find a way to mount them on your own. Speaking of flexibility, where are you gonna put the Nakamichi Dragon stuff?
It doesn't come with mounting hardware.
These stands that we got, while nice, are 300 bucks. That's kind of a bummer. So, like any solution, then, it has its advantages and disadvantages, but I think it boils down to this. The Dragon provides, I'd say about 80% of the experience that my AV setup provides, at a quarter of the price.
That is a massive value. But, and you probably know this if you've ever bought something like a graphics card, the issue is that it's easy to look good when you compare against something much more expensive, because the farther up the product stack you go, the worse value you tend to get. So, if we were to compare the Dragon then against something that costs a little less than half the price, like a Samsung Q990C that has many of the same features, but is more modest in size and has just a single subwoofer, well, you could make a pretty similar argument there, that you're getting a lot of the performance of the Nakamichi.
And, regardless of your budget, there are strong arguments to be made still for going the DIY route. Personally, and I'm sure I'm gonna ruffle some feathers here, I don't find that the height channels really add that much for me.
So, for two grand or even four grand, I might go with a mean 5.1 surround setup and an AV receiver that is gonna give me better quality sound right out of the gate and that I can sell and buy and upgrade over time to turn it into something truly exceptional.
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Check out their July promotion at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, hey, I did too. I love checking out stuff like this. Bold bombastic claims are so much fun to investigate, whether they fall well short or fall even just a little bit short like today.
If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the ones about my home theater setup.
We've apparently got a playlist of them.
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