Has any piece of hi-fi ever sounded as mythical or mystical as the Nakamichi Dragon?,” What Hi-Fi? once asked as we mused upon the most legendary hi-fi products of all time. The Dragon cassette deck was indeed one of our chosen 14, owing to the lasting prestige surrounding the exquisite high-end deck, born in 1982 following a decade of innovative and premium cassette deck design by the company.
The Dragon naming carried through to a turntable in 1985 and a CD player in 1996; but for the past two and a half decades it has lain mostly dormant, a thing of pure legend. That is until, at CES 2023, Nakamichi declared the Dragon reborn. The company launched a… no, not a new cassette deck, but a Dragon soundbar. Nakamichi has transformed into a rather different beast since that hi-fi heyday, and since the early noughties shifted its focus to lifestyle wireless products rather than play to its hi-fi pedigree, with the exception of the AV1/AVP1 amplifier pairing in 2014. We imagine Nakamichi fans of old would probably be quite precious over the Dragon brand, so it is nice to hear that the company spent five years developing the soundbar in order to get it right.