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John
Boiled down to its bare essentials, NAD’s M10 is a souped-up Bluesound Powernode that bolts Class D amplification to a BluOS network streamer and Dirac Live room correction. My review process is now in motion.
Inside the M10’s BluOS control app we see gateways to Deezer’s lossy and lossless tiers; Qobuz’s lossy and lossless tiers plus their smaller pool of hi-res titles (delivered natively); Tidal’s lossy and lossless tiers + a smaller pool of MQA-powered hi-res. Both Tidal and Qobuz can also be accessed via the M10’s (still to be certified) Roon Ready input.
For those content with a single lossy tier, the M10 supports Amazon Music, Napster and Spotify. The latter’s Connect functionality offers greater utility to yours truly than Apple Music’s slicker iOS and Android UI. Your decision tree might break the other way.
Apple Music is the world’s second most popular streaming service but is rarely supported by third-party network streamers. The M10 is no exception.
Time then to stick our collective thumb in the air to casually ask: Which music streaming service do you use the most? Roughly ten percent of Darko.Audio’s Twitter followers – 594 respondents – returned the following results:
YouTube’s polling feature expands the number of possible answers to five and, with our channel’s 30,000-strong subscriber count, the sample size to 2,300 and with a more mainstream skew:
The ensuing ‘Other’ comments skewed heavily in favour of Deezer and Google Music, which has me wondering how the results might have turned out if the poll had specified Deezer instead of Apple Music.
As it stands for Darko.Audio’s global audience, Spotify remains king of the hill of lossy services, Tidal of lossless and hi-res.
Explaining Qobuz’s weaker showing, we note that the French streaming service has only been available in the USA – its 12th country – for a matter of months and isn’t yet available in Canada or Aus/NZ. Tidal can be had in 53 different countries and has been servicing the USA for five years already.
The M10 review will follow in a week or three.
Further information: NAD
