I was considering this one at some point until they released the product brochure and the owner manual and I went through them. It took NAD a little over one year to come out from the time it was announced at CES 2011.

It uses NAD's Modular Design Construction (MDC) that allows one to install what appears to be about four expansion cards containing the digital processing circuity offering the various features. They may come out with a MultEQ XT32 module at some point in the future. It's just real lame that they haven't managed to include MultEQ XT32 yet on any of their products since XT32 was released. This doesn't impress me much coming from their R&D department.

For a modular design architecture that's been developed for over two years, it doesn't appear to be too flexible when I look at the available modules and the compatibility charts. For instance, there's no video processing in the base unit and when looking at the compatibility chart for their Sigma Designs VXP video processor "VM 200" module, which is a premium video processing technology, it doesn't appear to be supported for the new T 187 processor. Is it because of firmware design limitations or perhaps simply a poorly implemented modular architecture?

The T 187 processor has no balanced analog outputs whatsoever or any possibility of adding them in the future as the analog outputs are not modular. It uses "top level" Burr Brown DACs but they don't say which ones.

Furthermore, the modular design in no way guarantees the buyer a timely delivery of new features or that they can even be supported by the modular architecture. Other manufacturers like Denon or Onkyo/Integra churn out new models with the new features much more quickly than NAD has demonstrated in the last few years. Another possible gotcha may be the price for the new modules that could end up being overly priced.

All things considered, for the NAD T 187's asking price of $3000, I would pick up an Integra DHC-80.3 for $2600 without a second thought. It's built on a solid platform that been very well reviewed for many years, it has a ton more features like video processing and MultEQ XT32.