Nakamichi Dragon 11.4.6 Surround System Review | Slay or Nay?

I have now spent days in my little Lair with this beast and now it's time to find out if this Dragon really does spit fire or if it's just blowing smoke [Music] welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Dennison and I'd love to say that intro is the end of the bad Dragon puns but I can't make that promise I am who I am and puns just they come naturally to me what can I say anyway what we're really here for is a deep dive into the Nakamichi Dragon a massive Soundbar inspired Dolby Atmos surround system that makes every effort to offer performance as convincing and High Fidelity as that of an AV receiver and speakers but without all the speaker wire it is without a doubt the most over-the-top home theater in a box I've ever seen and I know that it aims to live up to the legendary dragons that preceded it for some of you that conjures up memories of the Dragon cassette deck for others perhaps the dragon laser tracking turntable now the Nakamichi we have to thank for this Dragon system isn't the same as the Nakamichi from back then but that doesn't mean that today's Nakamichi isn't 100 percent dedicated to Reviving The Spirit of the dragon that was developed by those who came before them I've spent a lot of time talking to these folks and their dedication is very impressive and it really has to be because this monster of a sound system is really something to make if you want to know a little bit more about dragon and watch me unbox it that video is right here but go watch that later because right now we're gonna get into as comprehensive a review as I know how to make oh so let's start with connections you get three HDMI inputs and one e-arc port and don't worry they are full on HDMI 2.1 ports so you can pass anything you want through Dragon Dolby Vision HDR 10 plus vrr 4K 120 8k60 whatever you like I tested it and it works there are also optical digital in and out ports and an auxiliary port but honestly folks if you aren't using HDMI to connect to the dragon well then you aren't getting what you paid for and I just wouldn't even bother optical digital is nice for some side piece devices but definitely use HDMI for your game console Blu-ray player or just your TV speaking of you can connect anything you want directly to dragon and then run video out to your TV but for most of my evaluations I connected devices to the TV and ran audio down through the TV's e-arc Port inside the main unit here are 14 drivers powered by seven digital amplifiers all housed in a steel chassis with custom ventilation honestly the design on this thing is just staggering in each of the surround speakers you get Five drivers and in each subwoofer you get two eight inch subwoofer drivers the total system power is claimed to be 3 000 Watts with Peak output at a blistering 125 DB the dragon offers an on-screen display that allows you to control just about everything you could possibly want to control for me the most important areas here are the audio menu specifically the audio setup and advanced audio setting sections and then the calibration menu now dragon has been designed so you don't have to go into this menu and monkey around much a lot of the controls are right here on the remote you can select the room size option and then just try different sound eqs for music games and movies and there's a night mode as well or you can turn all of that stuff off you can also cycle through some surround modes which I'll talk about in a moment or between stereo and all Channel stereo but folks I'm here to tell you that if you want the very best sound from the dragon system you should grab a tape measure grab your phone download a DB meter app unless you have a real decibel meter and do a little bit of work frankly I find this sort of thing fun but even if you don't find it fun just get into it and get it done there are a lot of options here and they aim to help folks get great sound no matter what kind of personal preferences or room characteristics they have going on now this is where I'll point out one opportunity for improvement of the Dragon I would like to see independent LFE Channel and bass controls see the elephant channel is a special low frequency effects Channel That's encoded in Dolby and DTS surround sound tracks it's mostly there for big deep explosive effects the LFE channel has nothing to do however with the bass that needs to be produced by the other speakers in a surround system and in this case the three inch drivers in the main unit and Surround speakers aren't meant to produce much bass they start to roll off at about 160 Hertz or so that means that the subs will pick up the base that the main unit and surrounds can't produce problem is that base level and the LFE level are not individually controllable it didn't turn out to be a huge problem for me in the end but that's the kind of control I would expect to see on a system that otherwise behaves very much like an AV receiver and that leads me to bring up this this is the spatial audio calibration disk made by YouTubers technodad and Joe Intel folks this is a disc that we have needed for many years now and I'm so glad it is out if you're serious about getting the most out of the dragon or any Dolby Atmos slash dtsx system I highly recommend you get this I have a link below this is not a sponsored segment I just really love having this tool for me it is absolutely essential and it's because I have this disc that I was able to determine the base roll-off point of various speakers in this system as well as fine tune the levels of all of the speakers but especially the front height front wide and rear height channels to pretty much Perfection see Dolby Atmos as it's mixed for movies is just kind of all over the place this disc is predictable and measurable so shout out to the spatial audio calibration disc also available as a digital download or both in a bundle next let's finally get into sound quality and surround sound quality and let's do that in three subsections one for movies one for TV and one for music now before I get into this specifically the round sound quality section I need to remind everybody who's watching that when you're dealing with a system like this that has up firing drivers for that most channel the sort that is meant to bounce sound off of the ceiling the nature of your ceiling and your room in general is going to have a pretty dramatic effect on what you get out of the system so if you have vaulted ceilings or extremely high ceilings you may not get as prominent an Atmos effect as I was able to get here in this particular room now with that disclosure out of the way the first thing I noticed about the dragon was the center channel Clarity and Fidelity I've stretched my memory back as far as it goes and I am quite sure that I have never heard any sound bar with dialogue Clarity and Fidelity anywhere near as good as what the dragon puts out and I think a big part of the credit for that goes to the use of AMT tweeters these folded tweeters use compression to make sound and they are extremely articulate that means that not only is the treble in sound effects remarkably clean but every sibilant every transient every little mouth noise is reproduced with startling Clarity it brings to mind an extremely expensive Martin Logan Center Channel that I once heard the next thing that I noticed was how well the subwoofers were integrated with the sound bar to paint one unified Sonic picture I know exactly how much work they're doing because I turned them off and listened to the dragon on its own and wow like the subs are picking up a lot but outside of wind there were big bombastic sound effects or really deep bass notes I wasn't aware of the subwoofers doing anything in particular because they Blended so well with the rest of the system that is rarely the case with Soundbar systems so I consider that a big achievement worthy of some serious praise so here it is I praise thee Nakamichi [Music] now as for Fidelity or sound quality the dragon sounds excellent it is a total Powerhouse there isn't a single Soundbar surround system that I've ever tested that can even touch its overall performance now if you sense a caveat there you're right and I'm getting to it look the dragon is just light years ahead of any Soundbar based system the only other system that may give it a challenge in some ways is the Sonos Arc mated to two Soto subs and two era 300 speakers and if you want me to put dragon head to head with that system let me know down in the comments if I get enough thumbs up on that I'll do it and as a bonus I'll just toss in the Samsung qn900a which until now was my top pick for a one box surround sound solution there are two main reasons that the dragon excels one is surround sound continuity the other is just pure Sonic Fidelity this Soundbar doesn't do anything wrong that is nothing stands out as bad there's no harshness there's no thinness there's no compression no honkiness no shoutiness there's no cheap base bloat every Soundbar system I've ever listened to save perhaps the Sonos Arc and Sennheiser ambio suffered from at least one of those and usually more for me the fact that the dragon doesn't do any of those things is an instant win and then pile on top of it that it yields excellent detail Dynamics crunch punch and natural sounding voices I mean yeah this is the kind of sound you typically have to purchase a decent AV receiver and high quality speakers in order to achieve and if you don't get the right speakers then you're likely going to run into some of those Sonic mishaps I just listed off in terms of Surround Sound Performance the sound field is remarkably contiguous now not every movie is mixed especially well just because it's in Atmos doesn't mean it's going to dangle sound objects from every corner of your room but I did enough auditioning with a wide enough array of movies that I heard a little bit of everything some examples at about 49 minutes into the force awakens we meet snoke who is in one nightmare of an echo cave and when snoke speaks that Reverb fills the whole room on a good system look there's no way that we can reproduce the sound of the dragon that you can hear at home even on headphones but we're going to give it a shot let's hear that take that I just talked about [Music] the dragon had the Echoes coming from everywhere above to the side behind and in front furthermore specific sound object locations had pinpoint placements especially from the main unit which has a way of casting sound objects well beyond its borders to points in space off to the side where obviously there are no speakers [Music] foreign sounds where speakers aren't that's what the dragon does and it is absolutely dazzling a great scene to show this off with is another from the force awakens at about one hour 16 minutes in when Rey is sneaking through the forest there are forest animal sounds all around her as well as other sounds real and imagined just before kylo Ren shows up is a real Showcase of object placement sounded awesome with the dragon now for TV shows everything I just said before I mean a lot of TV these days are really the same quality as movies like The Mandalorian for instance sounded just as good as the force awakens I mean can you tell I spent some time on Disney plus the one thing I will mention with regard to more conventional TV is that the dragon God dialogue intelligibility right with just about every show I watched Frasier King Of The Hill Family Guy Judge Judy Judge Joe Brown all the judges my judgment the Dragon slays TV slaves had to get that one in there so to recap for movies and TV the dragon is just a Thrill Ride it is captivating it's enchanting now for music this for me is the real test of a sound system's Fidelity because music gives you a real opportunity to latch your ear onto stuff that's very familiar and those sounds are sustained you get time with them you can take your time with analysis I think that's why pulling off music well is actually harder than pulling off flashbang movie content so for music I'll start by saying that with all four subwoofers active the dragon it's got booty a little junk in the trunk you know and I apologize if that sounds crass but that's really the most app description I can think of there's a thickness to the mid bass that doesn't sound like bloat it's just a little meteor it's not unpleasant I can actually see a lot of folks digging it but we're not talking about a neutral troll sound here there's some coloration here for sure but in this case it doesn't sound like the product of a poor design or poor voicing it sounds more like Sonic character than it does a fly if that makes sense it's something you'll hear in movies as grunt but in music it adds a sort of 1970s sealed KLH cabinet speaker sort of thunk I don't hate it though I do have to admit it does remind me a little bit of the cabinet resonance that I heard with the monolith Encore T6 from Monoprice just as I had for movies and TV I'd played with the bass setting adjusted the crossover Point down I went through all three music EQ modes and then even tried some of the movie and game settings the sound I just described persisted but then then I remembered I could turn some of the subwoofer drivers off so I turned off the two outward facing sub drivers leaving one in each cabinet active and folks that was it everything snapped into Focus for me the bottom end was a little bit more lean now but still plenty mean meaning the depth was still there but the meatiness and boxiness was gone I was like so pleased now there's no getting around the fact that the sound seems to come from the sound bar when you're in the native mode for listening to music that's where just the front left and right channels are active no surround up mixing involved the sound has some hype and it has pretty great width with that pinpoint Center image I mentioned but it stops short of being a wall of sound in the native mode for more of that wall of sound Vibe you'll need to engage the studio mode which does fake surround sound it uses some of the height drivers to fatten up the sound coming from the main unit but the surround speakers are also active in the end I tended to prefer the native mode just two channel with all of my dialed in settings so for music I saved my settings to the favorite number one spot on the remote and just press that anytime I was listening to to a stereo music source and it works great but for you whenever you're listening to music or movies I want to come back to this idea that you should really play around and customize Dragon to sound the way you like best and it's got everything you need to make that happen take some time try out all the EQ options try no EQ try no DSP at all try all Channel stereo then compare that to the studio setting for music play around I'm pretty sure you're going to find a setup that you like a lot and when you get that ideal setup for movies and then one for music save it as one of your favorites then you have one button access as you switch between content types because well here's where we come to my few criticisms of the Dragon the on-screen display and the menus offer a lot to Wade through and it can really take some time to open up the OSD navigate around make a change in selection and this is one of my chief complaints I wish the OSD and the the menu was a transparent overlay and I wish it didn't stop content from playing when you pulled it up one of the best ways of figuring out whether you like music One or music to EQ best for example would be to switch between them quickly and do an A B comparison you can't do that with dragon and that's a bit of a bummer also once you do make a change in the menu you'll need to pull out of the menu and when you do signal acquisition takes a second you have to wait for the sound to come back so if you switch sources or pause and restart or scrub forward and back on a show or go into the menu and then come back you'll have to wait a bit for the sound to start back up I'm also tempted to say something about the subwoofers eventually I got them doing what I wanted them to do and they are very powerful they can go very deep as well I've tracked them down flat to 40 Hertz and they will go down to 32 Hertz from there although a little bit quieter I just feel that maybe the subwoofers are a little overbuilt I'd rather see two subwoofers with one driver in a more robust cabinet but maybe that's just me and my final complaint is about the lack of dedicated LFE adjustment but I covered that already so I won't belabor it look I could go on and on and on I know I've had to leave some deep details out but we've been going at this for a while here so let me get to the idea of value proposition it might sound odd to bring in the word value when we're talking about a system that presently starts at thirty five hundred dollars and that's before you factor in mounts and stance but we've been here before right that's the same cost as the Sono system I mentioned earlier but then again the dragon doesn't do all the Sonos stuff that the Sono stuff does you can put together a decent Atmos system for a little bit less I think you need to go with the Onkyo rz50 for a receiver to get the kind of Channel support that Dragon offers and then you could pick up something like the Klipsch reference Cinema system you'd have to add another pair of those speakers and then you'd get yourself to a 7.1.4 system all of which would cost you about 21 to 2200 that's without any speaker stands and what gets you pretty close to what the dragon can do honestly but have fun with all that speaker wire and you won't be getting the width channels nor will you have some of the flexibility of Atmos effect placement that you get with specifically the surround speakers let you physically change where the driver is aimed so I mean I understand nakamichi's marketing that says you'd have to get a flagship Marantz pre-pro to get the processing power and then an 11 channel amp and then all these speakers and that would blast you way past thirty five hundred dollars but let's be honest you could get close with less money but it won't work like the dragon it won't look like the dragon and it won't feel quite like the dragon because while there may be more powerful beasts out there there's nothing quite as mystical and enchanting as the dragon thanks as always for watching everyone what do you think of my Dragon review I hope you liked it but even if you didn't let me know down in the comments don't forget to like And subscribe I'll see you on the next one and until then here's two other videos I think you might like foreign

Channel: Digital Trends

Views: 185,905

Keywords: nakamichi dragon 11.4.6 review, nakamichi dragon 11.4.6 soundbar review, nakamichi dragon soundbar review, nakamichi dragon review, nakamichi review, nakamichi surround sound system, nakamichi dragon soundbar, nakamichi dragon, nakamichi dragon 11.4.6, home theater, 11.4.6 home theater, dragon soundbar, best dolby atmos soundbar, nakamichi soundbar, home audio, home cinema, nakamichi soundbar 2023, nakamichi soundbar review, best dolby atmos soundbar 2023

Id: I11yU3v1sq0

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023