“Has any hi-fi piece ever sounded as mythical or mystical as the Nakamichi dragon?” we wrote a few years ago while musing on the most legendary hi-fi products of all time. The Dragon cassette deck was indeed one of our 14 picks, due to the enduring prestige surrounding the exquisite high-end deck, born in 1982 after a decade of innovative and premium cassette deck design by the company.
The Dragon name was carried over to a computer turntable in 1985 and a CD player in 1996, but for the past two and a half decades it has been more or less dormant, pure legend. That is – and you know what is coming – so far. At CES 2023, Nakamichi declared the dragon reborn. The company launched a… no, not a new Dragon cassette deck (although it did hand me press material on a USB stick in a charming cassette in honor of the heritage), but a Dragon soundbar. Such a lifestyle and AV-oriented product type might not naturally equate to former Dragons, although the choice to revive the line with a soundbar isn’t entirely surprising given that the Japanese company has made it big in that market of late .
Indeed, Nakamichi has transformed into a completely different beast since those hi-fi heydays. It’s changed hands more than a baton in a relay race and since the early 1990s has shifted its focus to wireless lifestyle products rather than appeasing its hi-fi pedigree. With the exception of the AV1/AVP1 amplifier link in 2014.
We imagine that Nakamichi fans of yesteryear not to mention the current Nakamichi team themselves would probably be quite precious to the Dragon brand so in a way it’s nice to hear that the company has five years spent developing the soundbar to get it right. I wonder if Nakamichi thinks that much…
An AV system soundbar hybrid
So the Dragon soundbar. Or maybe I should say Dragon ‘system’. It’s easier to understand Nakamichi’s ambitions for the new Dragon when you hear that the aim was to “create something between an AV surround system and a soundbar system”. After all, the Dragon isn’t just any soundbar, or even a soundbar and subwoofer; it’s a huge soundbar, a pair of significantly large surround back speakers and two subwoofers trying to act like four. Suddenly $3500 doesn’t seem so “out there” – especially now that we’re more “comfortable” with the $2500 price tag of the single-bar Sennheiser Ambeo Max.
However, if you’re not one familiar with the size of the Sennheiser Ambeo, you might throw your arms in the air in disgust at the sight of the Dragon beams, which are 58 inches (150 cm) wide and 7.7 inches tall. (19 cm) deep and weighs 14 kg alone. In fact, Nakamichi CEO Rayman Cheng says it had to approach a car company to manufacture such a large panel, and that if it weren’t for the shipping cost, the Dragon bar might have gotten even bigger!
It may not be the most practical unit to house, but it doesn’t look over the top with a large TV. The Dragon bar just tucked into the 75-inch TV he teamed up with for my demo.
How else could so many drivers fit into one soundbar? The whole system is 31 all-up, with 21 channels in an 11.4.6 configuration that supports both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X Pro decoding. Fun fact: This is supposedly the first plug-and-play soundbar setup to use the Atmos code designed for AV receivers that support channels greater than 7.1.4 – which may explain why many other Dolby Atmos soundbars excel on 7.1. 4.
Six of those drivers are up-firing (four of these are in the main soundbar and two in the 3D Omni-Motion Reference Surround speakers), and four are in the two subwoofers in a dual isobaric (push-pull) configuration. Those upward-firing drivers in the soundbar are angled at both 10 and 20 degrees (one on each side) to reproduce vertical and overhead sound objects at precise heights. The ones on the top of the surround speakers can be rotated up to 180 degrees to fit different room layouts too. And each surround speaker also has two three-inch drivers and an Air Motion Transfer tweeter.
These drivers are driven by 15 amplifiers, good for an output of 3000 watts. Suddenly the Dragon seems worthy of its colossal name. And also when you hear the, uh, scale…
Sonically fierce
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the numbers on this page, the Dragon can certainly unleash sound. This goes far beyond a soundbar setup that typically fills the space around the TV and listener, and even the ones we’ve heard come with separate (albeit smaller) surround speakers. The Dragon easily filled the suite, almost up to the rather high ceilings. As a room-filling alternative to a full-fledged speaker system, this isn’t a bad compromise when it comes to scale. With quite a few meters between the soundbar and the surround speakers, the sound field was not flat either.
It can also play loudly, with a peak volume of 125 decibels (which is about as loud as the sound of a jet engine 100 meters away). It’s not a volume I was willing to hit during my demo – my three-day-in-CES self wasn’t ready for that! – but even the comfortably loud half volume had me leaning back in my chair. And for me, that’s a first in the company of a soundbar setup. I tested classics Unbroken and Mad Max: Fury Road and the Dragon’s renditions were spot on when it came to atmosphere and cinematic excitement – jet engines and car revs had plenty of power, with the subwoofers really capable of digging their claws into explosions and the like, while gunfire was just right and airplane rattle and wind noise filled the room.
Now the Dragon essentially uses four subwoofers, and thankfully you can control how many you want in action at once with the remote control – because if you had all four on all the time, your sofa would probably be out of position in a matter of weeks. The maximum bass level is intense to say the least.
For all the volume, bulk and weight of the Dragon, Nakamichi has resisted making a system that screams at you. That said, the jury is still out on how subtle the system really is, as everything seemed very vibrant and direct in our demo – sonic properties that the hotel suite, with all its floor-to-ceiling windows, would have only emphasized.
Hopefully squad Which Hi-Fi? will get a chance to put it to the test to properly examine its dynamic agility and subtle details soon enough, but I can already be sure of one thing: the Nakamichi Dragon soundbar is a plug-and-play beast that a damn good one can make a roar.
LAKE:
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