NAKAMICHI Dragon soundbar
Hands up if you’ve always secretly hankered after a Nakamichi Dragon? Join the queue. The legendary Japanese cassette deck still commands huge prices secondhand (although some will tell you that the company’s 1000ZXL was better at recording).
Well the good news is that the Nakamich Dragon is back! The bad news is that it’s now a soundbar. It’s not the first time the name has been recycled — since the 1982 cassette deck there has been a Dragon computing turntable in 1985 and a CD player in 1996. And at least it’s been applied here to a suitably extreme product — this is a pretty wacko soundbar, with a 150cm-wide bar heading a system which offers 21 channels (11.4.6) delivered by a total of 31 drivers once you tot up those in each of the two 3D Omni-Motion
Reference Surround speakers (two three-inch drivers and an Air Motion Transfer tweeter) and the four subwoofer drivers across the two subwoofers in a dual isobaric (push-pull) configuration. Driving that lot are a total of 15 amplifiers, making for a claimed 3000W output. Perhaps worthy of the Dragon name, then!
It supports Dolby Atmos and aptX HD, and is interestingly the first to support DTS:X Pro, previously the domain of very high-end AVRs, and able to support up to 32 channels in contrast to DTS:X’s 11-channel maximum. With DTS having lost the current round of surround battle to Dolby Atmos, DTS:X Pro may represent its latest effort to get back into the game.
There’s no local pricing or availability announced yet, but it’s being trailed in the US at US$3499, which would likely put it somewhere north of even high-end soundbars like the two Sennheiser Ambeo models and the Devialet Dione.