If you shop at any large electronics retailer, you're bound to see families leaving the store with large boxes filled with complete home theater systems. These boxes contain speakers, a receiver and integrated DVD player that are meant to fill the needs of each application. While a HTIB can do a good job at simplifying the home theater experience, they can leave individuality out of the equation.

Additional Resources
• Read more receiver reviews from HomeTheaterReview.com.
• Find a pair of speakers to integrate with the L-70.

Seeing a need to bridge the gap between separate components and home theater in-a-box systems, innovative audio manufacturer NAD Electronics has developed a combination audio/video receiver and DVD player that can be mated to a set of speakers of your choosing. This new receiver/DVD combo, called the L70, is a convenience oriented "lifestyle" product that delivers high fidelity to equally balanced speakers.

Unique Features
Making a slight departure from the traditional NAD design of a grey matte finish, the L70 is embraced by a titanium anodized finish. The black buttons NAD uses in their other components have been replaced with textured silver knobs and buttons canted to the left. The result is a very attractive contemporary style all its own. The eye-catching design matches many modern flat screen televisions. Since surround sound formats allow for the same wide bandwidth and large dynamic range for the rear channels as they do for the front channels, all five channels of the L70 are capable of putting out an equal amount of power rather than limited power to the surround channels. To accomplish equaled output, NAD abandoned the accepted practice of using digital IC amplifiers used for slim-line cabinets and instead moved toward using higher quality discrete components capable of producing much more dynamic power. The Crystal DSP with AMK Sigma-Delta high resolution analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters are evidence of the superior ingredients used to complete the package.

EARS, the Enhanced Ambience Retrieval System exclusively from NAD is a software-based DSP program that produces musically convincing surround sound from stereo sources. Unlike program effects like "Stadium," "Concert Hall" or "Jazz Club," the EARS DSP program doesn't add unnatural synthesized reverb. The system takes only the audio information present in the original recording to envelop the listener in a warm natural environment without any artificial effects. Ambient information from stereo recording is fed to the rear channels by the EARS circuitry with in-phase information common to both left and right channels sent to the center channel. The product is a widened front image, natural acoustic environment and spatial surround channels.

The L70 is built with the audiophile in mind, but the DVD player incorporated into the receiver is feature packed, too. The multi-format playback plays the most popular disc formats and recognizes DTS or Dolby Digital media and automatically switches accordingly. Disc navigation is made simple from the controls on the faceplate, but more advanced features like multi-angle, multi-sound, multi-subtitle, frame, zoom and repeat can be called upon from the HTR-L70 remote control. The control has a logical layout that makes operating the L70 quite easy. Illuminated buttons and the ability to learn commands from up to 8 other pieces of equipment make the DVD/receiver an asset to home theater enthusiasts with a horde of remote controls.

Installation/Setup/Ease of Use
The L70 is a nice, compact unit that takes the place of individual components such as a DVD player and receiver of comparable performance. The unified component easily lends itself to a condo or apartment where limited space may dictate home theater choices. A den or game room would be a natural for this component, but front row center in a main home theater environment works equally well.

Flexible audio and video source connections are provided to join numerous components together. Cable, satellite and VCR inputs are the principle video inputs on the rear of the cabinet with an additional fourth input on the front panel for game consoles and video cameras. Six channel audio source inputs are also included for future expandability by adding new products with surround sound decoders. Video signals from the L70 to my monitor ran through component cabling, but S-Video and composite are included.