There's no doubt that, for a lot of people, there is just a better convenience/quality trade-off. I had a good size Onkyo system for watching movies and I configured it meticulously. But it's hard to explain to others why there is so much ceremony and bulk, especially when watching habits degenerate from immersive movies to binge watching netflix serieses.
Part of the experience with hobbies is some kind of sacrifice along with the reward. The drive towards convenience takes away that sacrifice and makes me appreciate something a little less.
It's like takeout and boxed wine, wearing a T-shirt; versus dressing up a bit, making a nice meal, and opening a bottle from a winery you visited. The former is ovjectively good and convenient, and all of the latter ceremony is a hassle that provides little benefit (you probably can't tell the boxed wine apart in a blind test).
But... aren't we happier with the latter experience?
I'm too lazy to "waste" time on that kind of happiness though. That's the sad part.
I think if I'm motivated by others it's different. For instance, stuff like surfing/snowsports requires a significant hassle, and it's a lot easier to find people who will put up with that hassle.
Weirdly in the last couple of weeks we’ve been clearing out our house and I found three(!) Onkyo home cinema amp boxes in the attic. I don’t own a single Onkyo amplifier anymore. Every single one got returned due to a serious fault (from suddenly producing no sound, to literal smoke coming out of it) within a year or 18 months, and typically swapped for another, slightly newer model Onkyo amp - rinse & repeat yearly. Their hardware from my experience was utter garbage. It had great features and UI, but literally went up in a puff of smoke on an annual basis. After three or four cycles I got fed up and changed to Yamaha. Unplugging a load of HDMI cables, speaker cables, re-running audio calibration, etc. is not something you enjoy repeating on an annual basis. I was always glad Richer Sounds (in the UK) have an unbelievably good returns policy. Even loaning me another amp FOC for a couple of months while Onkyo tried to repair one of them for me, before they gave up and just sent me a whole new higher end amp, free of charge.
I’ve got two Yamaha amps, both at least 3+ years old which have never had a single fault. I’ve also got a Denon home cinema amp, just over two years old which has never had an issue. To be honest I’m surprised they were still in business, as it never seemed from home cinema forums that my story was that unique.
And here I am: still using my first receiver ever, an Onkyo. It's still runs great after being in use for over twenty(!) years. My Philips CD player won't open the tray and my Aiwa Cassette deck won't play any cassette, but my Onkyo is still kicking. Maybe the models from the recent years don't have the quality as it used to be.
By the way, I just checked the backplate and it's an Onkyo TX-9031 RDS receiver from 1993 - time just flies ...
Isn’t it lovely when you realise you have electronics that have lasted nearly three decades and are still useful?
Onkyo were always well known for packing cutting edge features into home cinema amps. They always had way more features and codec support than anyone else. Nobody else came close for “bang for buck”, but they definitely had serious reliability issues.
Thinking about it tonight, just having some slow spinning fans probably would have alleviated 90%+ of their issues. But I guess the “audiophiles” would have complained about that…
"Isn’t it lovely when you realise you have electronics that have lasted nearly three decades and are still useful?
My Sony 100W per channel amplifier dates from around 1972 - '73 and it still performs perfectly. Moreover, none of the potentiometers (volume control, etc.) has gone scratchy with age, nor has any of the electrolytic capacitors lost sufficient capacity to a point where hum is induced in the output. Essentially, this 50 year old amplifier is still in perfect working condition.
Oh, BTW, it has a handbook complete with circuit diagram and a list of replacement parts if anything were to go wrong but I've never had to use it in earnest.
When I look at the poor state and quality of electronics products these days I often wonder why we consumers let their quality and the service thereof fall to such a shocking low standard over recent decades.
By not complaining sufficiently, we've only ourselves to blame.
If you're interested in fixing this: it sounds like power comes on. So maybe the drive belt has disintegrated? Recently replaced a belt on a thing from the late 1970s. The belt was no longer elastic, which means it had snapped, and you could "cut" it some more by merely touching it. On Amazon you should be able to find packs of cassette rubber belts, and one or more of them will probably fit.
If/After the movement seems all right, try cleaning the heads with IPA (try pressing play without anything inserted and then clean the bits of metal that come out, as well as the capstan and pinch roller). There may be other things wrong with it (motor speed, head azimuth (angle)).
I recently tried to replace the belt on a mini perl cassette recorder. The shape of the belt wasn't round, it was a semicircle on the outer side and a wedge shape on the inner. How does one even Google that XD
I've had mixed results with cleaning heads with IPA. My head often seems very sluggish the next morning, and other people with whom I spend such evenings have reported similar results with their heads.
I remember those days people used to say if it's Japanese at least you don't need to worry about quality. There was also this "quality movement" in Japan.
I bought an Onkyo 5.1 receiver at a garage sale yesterday for $5.
This house I moved into has prewired surround speakers and I felt like I should take advantage.
What a hassle though, I can’t get audio flowing from the tv, can’t get it to drive all the speakers, it runs super hot.
It really seems like a hardware hobby more than a way to enjoy movies so far.
Unfortunately a modern receiver is worth the money.
A modern one will have Bluetooth and Wifi connection, so you can stream and control music direct from your phone or computer in another room.
On the TV side, a modern receiver probably has built in chromecast. It will support eArc so your TV can control the receiver directly - when watching TV you don't need to use the receiver remote at all, it will switch sources and be able to change volume with the TV.
The good thing about this kind of setup, if you're interested in it, is that you can buy some speakers that you really like, and they will never be obsolete; but you will need to replace the receiver occasionally (maybe every 10 years).
The UX on all AVRs is always the same and always dreadful though. People who buy them buy them for featureset not UX, which I guess is why it hasn't really improved.
This matches my experience, too. Setting up eARC and especially getting PS5 to use all speakers while being connected only to the TV took quite a bit of time, though.
> A modern one will have Bluetooth and Wifi connection, so you can stream and control music direct from your phone or computer in another room.
Watching any video or listening to hi-fi audio from another room is, to put it mildly, undesirably suboptimal: this is what I'd call an attack surface, not a feature.
Honestly.. just drop 400 to 500 bucks on a recent Marantz or Denon amp, your experience will be infinitely better. Five bucks might have been extortion and/or theft. Also, a decent sub (or two ;)) and spending time tuning it to your room, makes maybe more difference than anything else.
Why not? Regular ARC works fine on my Denon/LG setup. Is eARC lacking support because of a driver issue they could fix, or some kind of licensing issue?
My Yamaha 2.0 amplifier is “buggy” in that it sometimes fails to turn on, so I have to pull it’s power cable and plug it back in to get it to turn on again.
But it’s also 6 years old, and was a cheap model. I’m still trying to find a decent amplifier for my home setup that’s not some 7.2 giant monstrosity but I’ve not had much luck.
Commenting as I didn't know about this option for stereo amplification until a couple of years ago: I'm using Alientek D8, a "full digital" amplifier. It's great -- tiny, affordable, superb sound quality. Digital inputs are optical, coaxial, and USB (works as an external sound card).
To get more sources such as Chromecast, computer, and Blu-ray player I have a HDMI splitter (Portta HDMI Switch) that can extract audio from the HDMI signal before passing it forward to beamer/television.
I bought a Yamaha amp in 2000, still works perfectly.
If I needed a new one I think I would go the DIY route; there are many models for less than $50 that seem very appealing. You can make a case around them to fit whatever setup or shelf organization you have.
Man that's fascinating: I just found a digital amplifier board that does 50W-50W 2.0 channel output with coaxial digital input, perfect for what I'm after, for like $70 lol.
I wonder what it sounds like. I might buy one just to find out.
I had an Onkyo receiver that suddenly stopped working. I always attributed it to a nearby lightning strike frying it (and only it), but now your comment makes me wonder if it was just straight up defective.
I had two very old receivers that lasted a number of years each. When the last one wouldn't stay on, I tried to then buy another Onkyo receiver. Somehow late last year but there was some insane shortage everywhere, and Best Buy was literally out of everything. Online also proved to be difficult.
I therefore couldn't find another Onkyo to buy, and after some research I learned that those receivers (of various brands) with complicated A/V functions are the ones that have issues. I ended up getting a higher-end, but non-AV (meaning no HDMI) simple stereo receiver and have been happy so far.
This. We had some Onkyo speakers and an amplifier.
One of the speaker got broken and the amp was acting "weird" like sometimes not outputting any sound but turning it off and on was literally fixing, etc.
I'm still rocking my 20yr old Onkyo amp. Maybe they're out of business because lots of people are still using their old equipment happily? Anecdotes, huh.
>It's like takeout and boxed wine, wearing a T-shirt; versus dressing up a bit, making a nice meal, and opening a bottle from a winery you visited. The former is ovjectively good and convenient, and all of the latter ceremony is a hassle that provides little benefit (you probably can't tell the boxed wine apart in a blind test).
>But... aren't we happier with the latter experience?
I think this is increasingly true of us as a society. We have been consistently elevating "ease of use" over every other objective and/or subjective quality.
We've reached the point where easier is better, even if it is objectively worse.
We are all settling for local maximum that are significantly lower than several other maxima because apparently making the effort to move further along the x-axis is now almost considered the worst thing one can do.
I partly agree. Though once you do have a working setup and know which buttons to press, there isn’t a lot of inconvenience anymore, apart from being bound to the particular room.
The problem for the industry is more that an important target group for them are A/V nerds who are never satisfied for long with their setup and are always looking for the next best thing to upgrade to, and which also serve as a multiplicator. And those are becoming fewer and fewer.
Yeah, I kept telling myself
that, and it was true most of the time. But any time you need to add something (video game system brought by a friend, whatever), or some new tech comes along, it throws everything off. And sometimes you have to move, and it doesn't really work out as well in the new place.
"And [AV nerds] are becoming fewer and fewer."
Isn't that related to my point though? When convenient products get good enough to take the magic out of a hobby, where do the new recruits come from?
A big driver for a hobby is being able to say (to yourself at least) that what you're doing is somehow better than what a layperson with a big wallet can do. That you're "the guy/gal" when it comes to this topic, perhaps surpassed by others who've also invested time.
Thinking out loud... This is probably some kind of deep rooted social need for specialization/role in a tribe that gives a sense of importance. We have jobs, which are highly specialized, but nobody in our social circle really cares unless they have a very similar job.
That's the problem though - the people who treat "listening to music" as an activity of its own are getting fewer and fewer. I listen to a lot of music, but I mostly do it while commuting, while programming etc., not in the living room. I even have a good old stereo that's served me well for over 20 years now (Sony, not Onkyo), but it mostly only serves as better PC speakers nowadays. I still play a CD on it occasionally though...
I think “listening to music as an activity” and “buying, tweaking and upgrading expensive audio setups” are two separate activities that often overlap but do not require each other.
As an example, I fiercely enjoy sitting on my couch with my eyes closed listening to full albums of the White Stripes or Stars of the Lid or Boards of Canada or Sufjan Stevens on my AirPods Max, streamed via Bluetooth from my iPhone. Every audiophile would laugh in my face because of the poor hifi choices I’m making.
But I’m damn sure I’m really attentively listening to the music.
It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great place where they scientifically analyse audio equipment. The quality of speaker wire for all meaningful measurements is utterly irrelevant for instance.
Realistically, as long as you are enjoying the art, how you are enjoying it should be irrelevant.
I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie.
The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo.
On one had, totally agree. The audiophile world is full of so much nonsense.
On the other, a decent home theatre amplifier and set of speakers is going to blow away a sound bar. I think people who think "it all sounds the same" have never heard a really good stereo. I have an alright, but far from high end, stereo set up in a listening environment in my basement, and everyone I've ever listened to music with down there is blown away.
Absolutely. 100%. Last night we turned the “stereo” up really loud after Eurovision to listen to Mikas album for the first time in years - Full height Revel fronts, monitor audio rear effect speakers, dual subs, blasted it. I spent hours tuning curves on the Denon amp with an external microphone last year… Anyone that thinks a sound bar would sound anything like what we hear is honestly deluded. But, I also wouldn’t spend much more money on it… it’s way more than good enough for us… audiophiles would tell me I could spend another £10k on equipment chasing another 1%, I’m not sure at this point it would deliver anymore intrinsic value. At a different token, two Sonos in Stereo in my kitchen are more than good enough while I’m cooking to listen to music and podcasts.
I’d never, ever, want to see high end audio equipment die. When it all works together, the experience is truly sublime, engrossing and immersive like nothing else.
Same. The only thing I miss about owning my own home is that I can't set up a home theater. The last house I owned had a bare-to-the-studs basement when we bought it. I built a home theater to die for there: ran every wire you could think of, built the walls and ceiling where and how I wanted for optimum sound, acoustically treated everything, researched all the audio and video equipment, installed a projector, built my own screen, even built all of my speakers myself, in my shop. The whole process took a year, and I had an enormous amount of fun doing it. And it worked: Watching movies was great, but sitting there with the lights dimmed low, listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, or (different mood) Dire Straits "Love Over Gold"...There's no experience that compares.
Sounds like bliss. Not just the end result, the process as well. I think that’s what people who haven’t gone down the audio highway don’t understand. The constant tweaking and adjusting is sometimes a very cathartic experience. You really do get to enjoy the fruits of your labour like very few other endeavours.
Recovering audiophile here. I used to continually chase gains until I got more into the professional side of things (I’ve been making music myself for a couple of decades). I ended up getting a few TOTL setups and I regret not doing that sooner. I went through entirely too many mediocre headphones and speakers before just spending the money on high-end studio monitors. I’d recommend people check out the pro offerings from ATC, Focal, Barefoot, PSI, DynAudio, Adam, etc. My living room setup now is literally just a MiniDSP SHD to handle Spotify/ AirPlay streaming and preamp duties into the active monitors. Vinyl setup runs through a Muffsy phono preamp kit I built. Headphones are mainly a high-end set of custom IEMs, Shure electrostatics, and Senn HD800S with a nice RME interface as DAC + amp. All that solved my GAS on the listening side, now I take all the money I’ve been saving there and put it into interesting synths and eurorack ;)
The pro side has some weird beliefs and desires too though, like an obsession with vintage gear including stuff like early digital reverbs. Plenty of pros believe that Mogami Gold cables are actually better in terms of sound quality, but my studio is wired up with Canare star quad for the extra noise rejection and a lot of GLS plus some Hosa patch cables as I’ve found their connectors to be good-enough quality and the cables are generally easy enough to work with / durable without being overly expensive. Megabuck old-school gear like LA-2As, 1176es, Neve 1073s, Neumann U67 and more-recent Sony C800-G mics, Manley compressors, etc all have crazy followings and people are always GASing for them, but they won’t make a crap song magically sound good, only take an already-good song and take it up another 10% (and even then only in skilled hands). So much more can be achieved by most folks with just more practice and education around mixing, yet everyone wants to spend their way to better sound.
Instruments and their amps are arguably even worse, with guitar and synth players as large contributors (I’m guilty as heck here too). We always want that perfect axe that we somehow believe will take us to the next level, or that vintage CS-80 or Rhodes. We know we’d be better off practicing and learning our instruments better, but instead we endlessly tweak Kemper profiles, swap strings / pickups / picks, rewire pedal boards, rearrange modular synths, and most importantly, read, talk about, and pine for the next gear purchase. It’s madness. There’s even a joke in the modular community that making music is the least important part of modular synths. “Music? Never heard of it. My $8000 electronic mission center only does microtonal bleeps and bloops in Euclidean cycles.”
But anyway, hobbies are fun. Sad to see Onkyo go, but not that sad as I never actually owned any of their gear. They seemed like a cheaper Denon. I was always more into the DIY side of home audio before I switched to pro gear, with folks like Nelson Pass and Siegfried Linkwitz as personal heroes. Don’t forget Roger Linn and Daphne Oram on the creation side!
> I’d recommend people check out the pro offerings from ATC, Focal, Barefoot, PSI, DynAudio, Adam, etc.
Seconding this. A friend of mine had a pair of ATC SCM25As, and they blew me away. I had never heard music like that before (and I'd been producing music for a decade prior on mid-range professional gear). I didn't have 20k to drop, but I did have $2k, so I got a nice pair of headphones + a little desktop DAC+Amp setup, and I'm about 90% as happy.
I literally did not know what I was missing. And I consider myself fairly pragmatic about audiophile stuff.
As a side note, this friend was also super into vintage gear, but for different reasons than you mention... for him, vintage gear is how he could take tax writeoffs in his industry (video games), where finding things to expense is fairly difficult. A $50k vintage compressor is an easy loss on the balance sheet, then you sell it later for what you paid, or more. Similar to how art works on the high end.
As far as cables etc are concerned, I personally have a very weird situation, where I have a large radio transmitter on the roof above my apartment. I've found that audio gear involving amplification (turntable pre-amps especially) are very very sensitive to RF interference from the transmitters above me. So I've spent more time than I'd have liked swapping out parts to ensure my entire chain is properly shielded from interference (e.g. I had to get rid of an otherwise great Schiit turntable preamp because it picked up too much noise). Really uncommon and frustrating thing to deal with.
Speakers are a personal choice and ATCs aren’t forgiving of poor rooms, but I have SCM50ASLs and like them very much. I also have smaller ATCs for surround and the sound is quite consistent between models.
I don't agree with the inverse. Bad speakers (eg laptops, especially Thinkpads) can make listening to good songs into a meh experience. It's better than nothing when you want music, but rarely will you notice that spontaneous feeling of love for what you're hearing. This doesn't justify the utterly diminishing returns of the audiophile world or the whole speaker cable nonsense, but paying something for a decent setup is worth it. Although from what I understand that effective price point is much lower with headphones compared to speakers.
For movies, I watched a cam rip once. The experience was so bad I vowed never again. And the weird bit is all the distortions were like only half-perceptable (warbly audio, mild shadows / reflections from people walking near the camera), so I would just feel like something was wrong but couldn't immediately place it.
There’s also the matter of familiarity — if you’ve already heard a song on good gear many times, your brain will fill in the gaps even on bad playback equipment, but finding new stuff might not be as enjoyable because much will be left out, like bass textures, interesting things happening with sound staging, and even entire bits of melody or background that aren’t easy to pick out with smartphone / laptop / normal car speakers.
Edit: the car case is particularly funny as many luxury brands offer $$$$-$$$$$ options for better sound systems when they can’t solve the fundamental flaws of compromised placement and background noise inherent to cars. That McIntosh system in your new $120k Jeep Grand Wagoneer might impress the neighbor but it still won’t do much to quiet the roar of real all-terrain tires on the highway.
> The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo.
Not really agree on this one. I would say you will still like it and maybe enjoy it because this is the only way you can enjoy it while driving. But that doesn't mean it sound great.
The issue is that most music is overcompressed these days to make up for the fact that most people are listening to music in hostile environment or with bad devices. Which make the difference with higher fidelity equipment less important. Without being an audiophile I have records from the 90's that only felt so great on headphones or decent hifi. The music was less compressed these days, there were much higher amplitude difference between parts of the song, instruments. Back in the days listening on the radio felt weird and flat. We just lowered the bar to the point that everything feel weird and flat. Like fast food or premade dishes that only have a general way too salty or too sweet tastes where your palate cannot do the sorting anymore of the different ingredients that have been put to it.
I still think a decent hifi equipment would make a ton of difference for someone into classical records. Modern POP music? Waste of money.
> It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great place where they scientifically analyse audio equipment. The quality of speaker wire for all meaningful measurements is utterly irrelevant for instance.
You are talking about the extreme kind of audiophiles that aren't really representative of the community, which covers a wide spectrum of people. It's like saying all developers are socially awkward loners. Merely a stereotype.
> I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie.
Of course. Noone would argue against that. However a great movie really shines on good equipment. Imagine watching Blade Runner 2049 on a laptop display. No amount of convenience is making that experience worthwhile in my opinion.
Imagine watching Blade Runner 2049 on a laptop display. No amount of convenience is making that experience worthwhile in my opinion.
I watched most of the 'classic' movie canon (including the original Blade Runner) on rented VHS tapes and a cheap CRT TV, and many of those where among the most 'worthwhile' movie watching experiences in my life. A great movie will 'shine' on any equipment.
Speaking as an audiophile, although I don't exactly agree with your specific choice of headphones (I have to say that or I wouldn't be an audiophile) I strongly agree with using good headphones driven by any old thing. Audio quality these days only really depends on the transducers - i.e. whatever converts things to or from electricity, which, unless you've got a turntable, means just your headphones and/or speakers. Dealing with audio while it's in the electrical domain is a solved problem and your iPhone does it as well as the most expensive equipment.
I have a pair of nice headphones (Hifiman Aryas, planar magnetics) that need to be driven fairly hard compared to most dynamics, and to that end, I've found that an outboard DAC + amp with enough juice to drive them properly makes a big difference. And not an "unnoticeable to audiophiles only" difference but a very obvious one.
That's an electrical compatibility thing more than a quality thing. iPhones+headphone jacks have high quality DACs (better than "audiophile equipment" which is a scam) but aren't good with high impedance, partly because it'd drain the battery.
> the people who treat "listening to music" as an activity of its own are getting fewer and fewer.
I used to joke if I made it rich, I'd buy a night club and have my office facing the area where the DJ is doing their magic as I love listening to good mixes when coding and having a work environment which is almost like a recording studio is rare.
I've had access to a lot of hifi components some of it quite high end but not as high end as a pair of floor standing speakers that cost £125k today.I also knew a wizard of an electronics engineer who could get anything working, all of the manufacturers have/had their "problems" so most of it came down to branding and what the press said.
> Though once you do have a working setup and know which buttons to press, there isn‘t a lot of inconvenience anymore, apart from being bound the particular room.
I was going to comment the same... I've got a quality stereo amp (bought used), great floorstanding loudspeakers, a little DAC. I set up everything once, making sure everything was correctly positioned. There's one input I use on the amp: the DAC. I typically hook a MacBook Air to the DAC.
There's zero inconvenience. There's a volume button and that's it.
No updates. No wifi. No "smart" anything. Only a totally dumb setup that simply works.
I think what should also be highlighted is not that we necessarily just prefer convenience, it's that we don't value effort and craftsmanship so much anymore because the 'cheap' systems produce 'good enough' products. Suits can be quality enough without being hand tailored. Home order meals are not the cardboard horrors of the past, they're ok enough to outweigh the effort of creating a meal from scratch, etc.
I think it's terribly sad honestly.
I think the major, major downside is the gradual migration to a complete lack of knowledge of how to make things, except for the centralised, large, automated product makers.
We sacrifice our autonomy without realising it, while at the same time losing our ability to even discern and appreciate hand crafted skill and the value it provides.
The problem is that there is no choice. There are no good receivers that have modern UIs with sane defaults. They just hacked on wifi and phone apps that do a horrible job papering over the complexity. Sonos tried to fix this but their hardware is woefully inadequate for theater quality setups.
Related, my Yamaha thinks that the most important status display it can have is that the input is, indeed, not mono. No mention of 5.1 etc, just "stereo".
I feel that the AV-receiver market has gone the way of the DSLR market. Compact speaker systems like Sonos (that don't need a separate AVR) simply got good enough. Thus the need for buying a separate AVR to drive your Dolby / DTS / etc. setup has all but vanished except maybe for the most determined audiophiles (and even most of these would do well to simply get a compact wireless speaker setup instead of some monstrosity that they can hardly ever enjoy...because too small of a listening room, and neighbours).
I'm not saying market for Onkyo, Denon, Sony, Yamaha, etc. AVRs is a goner, but I am suggesting it may have peaked and that going forward there will be less and less demand for AVRs, especially in the low/mid range of things.
Sonos still has severe limitations and I regret buying two 5.1 setups from them.
As a simple example: there is no 7.1 support at all and the Atmos support is a sort of faked 5.1.2 support where the upward firing speakers try to bounce some sounds off the ceiling.
Sonos only supports 2.4GHz (no 5GHz support at all) so in a congested area network degradation is a big issue.
Codec support is limited as well. For example if your source outputs in DTS, you may need to throw away the whole system and buy a different sonos system just to get audio working. The same thing applies to dolby atmos or vision - you need to buy new speakers just to listen to those type of sources.
I don't this contradicts the "gone the way of the DSLR market" claim. Sonos and similar systems are simply good enough for most people.
Whether it's TVs, cameras, surround sound systems, we reached a point of diminishing returns by cramming in more pixels or speakers. At that point, you're competing on factors like convenience. There will still be markets for 7.1+ surround sound or DSLR cameras, but they're smaller now.
With DSLRs my main complaint to this day is still the lack of a good modular lens system for phones (I understand some of the challenges and tradeoffs). For most people's camera habits (selfies, food shots, group pictures...) the lenses your modern flagship phone provides are mostly great.
What's seriously lacking though is in the say 50-70+mm focal length range. I have an old Canon DSLR in my office storage collecting dust I had to quickly dust off and throw some batteries in to get some shots at the edge of my yard a few weeks back to capture some unique wildlife that was hanging out. With my flagship premiere phone I simply couldn't capture the moment, no matter the hope of digital zoom techniques and a built in "zoom" lens. Stepping closer would have killed the opportunity.
My 10+ year old DSLR was there to save the day. Quickly rummaged out my 400 mm lens and simply stabilized on a table and got mostly the shots I wanted. My smartphone cameras have been good enough and convient enough to capture most things I want but I really wish there was a mount system for small portable optics
Another huge problem I've experienced with phone cameras is that they seem to all need to autofocus before taking a shot. This is horrible for, say, trying to take a picture out of a car's window as the car is moving, as the phone camera keeps refocusing on different parts of the scene, so I often miss the shot I need to take.
Any DSLR (and even many non-phone point-and-shoot cameras) have manual focus, so this is just not an issue with them.
Other problems with phone cameras are relatively slow shutter speeds and poor low light performance compared to DSLRs.
Phones can also only do digital zoom, which is horrible compared to a DSLR with a zoom lens. There's no way to put lens filters on phones either. They can't do infrared photography, etc, etc.
Lots and lots of ways that phones simply haven't caught up to DSLRs yet.
> With DSLRs my main complaint to this day is still the lack of a good modular lens system for phones (I understand some of the challenges and tradeoffs). For most people's camera habits (selfies, food shots, group pictures...) the lenses your modern flagship phone provides are mostly great.
Point-and-shoot cameras have been replaced by phones; DSLRs, on the other hand, are rapidly being replaced by mirrorless cameras. Mirrorless cameras, at least on the surface, seem to be an improvement on DSLRs -- they don't require a mirror, so they're both easier and cheaper to manufacture, they allow for modular lens systems, and even allow for more features (like shooting video as well as stills) than a traditional DSLR.
DSLR just got replaced by mirrorless basically same thing but without a mirror, cameras still have a more tech advancements to come, better EVF,global shutter, lower noise, higher fps, better AF, better metering, better IS, better battery life etc etc, a bit difference to a speaker that can only improve audio quality and at this point i probably can't tell the difference between a good 20 year old speaker and one bought today.
I think the point is that sure, recently DSLR got more or less replaced by mirrorless, tech wise, but the camera market as a whole has been massively diminished because smart phones ate it from the bottom up.
Now they're good enough that basically the DSLR/Mirrorless market is really just for enthusiasts or those with very specific needs.
enthusiasts? its for professionals and some enthusiasts, i doubt high end camera gear has reduced market share but the lower end consumer grade stuff has for sure gone since most people don't care about image quality etc when their phone can do basic photography. Just checked the sony A series lines cameras since 2015 have increased units sold every year.
The point of the argument was that sonos and other smart speaker tech like sound bars etc, have eaten the market for hi-fi in the same sort of way. There is an enthusiast market, sure, and likely always will be. But it's way, way smaller than the old 'full' market and it's slowly declining as the convenient, easy to use products continue to get better (or continue to be terrible but convenient, if you want to be dismissive, but objective tests seem to show smartphones taking pretty damn good images these days).
i am not being dismissive, phone cameras are just no where near as good as a larger sensor camera, yes probably most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference on a smart phone small screen, but when your editing and doing large prints its very obvious especially when the phone camera uses anything higher then base ISO it becomes mush or that fake bokeh to mimic real cameras and editing latitude is really bad
yes smart phones did cut in the consumer grade camera market but the professional level cameras continue to do well and have increased in sales.
thing is about cameras you can't make a small sensor better then a larger one its not physically possible, this is a big difference between cameras and speakers... speakers have not changed much in the last 20 years most people won't be able to tell a difference between a 20 year old speakers sound quality then a modern one, so less and less people invest in those, who needs to upgrade a speaker every few years? so you can't compare cameras to speakers.
And this was written a couple of years ago, with 2019 phones used to compare. The conclusion is that the non-smartphone market is likely to keep shrinking because the pictures keep getting better, but that people who want to 'tell a story' and tweak everything will probably stay with cameras.
> yes smart phones did cut in the consumer grade camera market but the professional level cameras continue to do well and have increased in sales.
No, they haven't, see the link I gave you before. Sales of all changeable lens cameras as a market sector are declining, regardless of how Sony's range is doing. In the mean time, sales of just body units are up as a percentage, meaning fewer folks buying starter kits - i.e. even in the pro-sumer sector the casuals are dropping off and the remaining market is people who are really into it.
> thing is about cameras you can't make a small sensor better then a larger one its not physically possible
But you can use multiple sensors with different characteristics and very smart software to do incredible things. You're getting into audiophile territory here. Phone cameras continue to improve faster than the camera-camera market can keep up, adding all sorts of stuff like depth sensors, IR, physical zoom capabilities etc, and they are a massive win on convenience. So this is cutting the market down to those very few individuals who do care about tweaking ISO levels and setting up the perfect shot.
I'm not saying "nobody will use DSLR/Mirrorless", but as phone cameras continue to get better and better, that market shrinks. This is borne out by the market figures.
And this is just like the hifi market, where good-enough + smarts + convenience is winning out in the same way.
Frankly, even if the market sector were holding steady, your objection to the comparison is bizarre. It doesn't have to be 100% exactly the same for the comparison to stand - the convenient/polished/not-necessarily-technically-superior product has eaten the vast majority of the market in both cases.
and yet noise has improved over the years same with the dynamic range, to the point where they can decrease photodiode size and still keep fairly good noise and then also release cameras with lower resolution with this technology to have very good low light capabilities like the A7S series. Look at the Canon EOS R3 just a massive jump in ISO quality and double the resolution of the A7SIII
Resolution has little effect on 'shot noise' (The noise I was talking about). That's because when viewed at the same size, the noise averages out to be the same visual noise.
I believe that 'low light capabilities' are going to stagnate soon-ish simply because shot noise starts dominating sensor noise. The only real solution to shot noise is just more exposure. But aperture is generally maxed, and it seems unlikely to me that image stabilization can go much further.
I just want to point out that while sonosnet is 2.4 only, most of their products support 5ghz APs. In addition, DTS support has been included for a little while now.
I was actually surprised they bothered to add it at all. It's definitely not for their target audience: people using streaming services. What they provide is actually great for that audience.
My best guess is that they keep pushing into the home theater space and wanted to grab a bit of market share from the higher-end bucket without having to pay too much in licensing.
It all comes down to demand I guess... Most people seem to like Beats headphones or think their Airpods have top quality sound and don't care that $200 headphones exist that blow them out of the water. Most people use bluetooth with low quality codecs that distort the sound. In addition, most people listen to their music on streaming services that compress the heck out of tracks that are already heavily (dynamic range) compressed. So it's a case of (a) people never having been exposed to "hi-fi" and (b) people ceasing to care/being willing to sacrifice audio quality (which is heavily subjective anyway) for convenience. So it is the same as phone cameras, people are willing to sacrifice image quality and control for the convenience of having a camera in their pocket all the time.
I personally care about audio to a reasonable degree, but I also think that AVRs in their current form are a weird mix of "too much" and "not enough". I wanted to have a 5.1.2 system that wasn't a soundbar with tiny, tinny speakers that bounce off the ceiling and a tiny sub that moves hardly any air. But in order to drive decent speakers you need a decent amp. But in order to get a decent amp you have to buy a unit that has a million connectors, spatial audio processing, etc. Out of the gigantic array of connectors on the back of my AVR, (7 HDMI ports, phono plugs, component, composite) I am currently using 3 HDMI ports because I play most media off an HTPC anyway. I feel like I'm using less than 30% of what it has to offer, and there is a growing divide between people who want convenience and people who want uncompromising quality at any cost, so low end AVRs aren't much better than a soundbar, and high end AVRs aren't affordable for the average consumer.
I’ve been a headphone mid-fi buyer for at least 15 years now (think Denon AH-D2000, B&W P5 etc.) and it’s just also the case that lower-fi audio has greatly improved.
The sound quality AirPods or the Samsung buds deliver are simply very very competent for the price. They’re good sounding, convenient, dependable.
Contrast to the crap you used to get included with your iPod or the entry level IEM’s that were 99% bass and 100% ear pain and snapped cables.
It’s not that people enjoy crap these days. It’s just that previously you needed to spend Onkyo levels of money to get decent sound, and these days a lot less.
Streaming services don't compress dynamic range, rather the opposite - because every streaming service employs loudness normalization the loudness wars have largely ended. Compressing your track to hell in an effort to get it to sound louder doesn't work anymore because every streaming service will just normalize it anyway.
Spotify at least uses 320kbps vorbis for their "high quality" setting which is at the point where I don't believe it's humanly possible to distinguish from a lossless encoding.
I've been digging up a lot of remastered 80s albums from the last 5-7 years (mainly Japanese stuff), and I can 100% tell you that this is not the case. The engineers may not be sucking every last decibel out of the tracks anymore, but they're still compressed to hell, dynamic range often 5-10dB less than the original version straight off the 80s-era CD.
If you think about the way normalization works, there's still benefit to slapping a master limiter on top of it and pushing it to the point where normalization doesn't require any gain, because at least then you have control over the final mastering chain. But I don't think this is the reason, and I don't really know why they still juice it hard. Maybe for car stereos, or because phone amps are weak, or because they're not thinking about Spotify specifically.
> Compressing your track to hell in an effort to get it to sound louder doesn't work anymore because every streaming service will just normalize it anyway.
This is a bit of confused remark. "Normalization" means applying some constant gain factor to the signal so that the loudest level is 0dBFS. Compression applies a varying gain factor to the signal to meet some parameters. Normalizing audio will generally make it louder (unless the loudest level is already at 0dBFS), but it does not change the dynamic range of the signal. The "loudness wars" were all about using compression, and this does change the dynamic range of the signal (you end up with less difference between the quietest and loudest parts of the signal - hence the term compression).
You can still "sound louder" by using compression, even if the peak volume is still 0dBFS.
Modern volume normalization isn't done based on the highest peak of the track. Instead they normalize based on the average perceived loudness of the whole track (to a level below 0 so there is headroom for peaks). It's intentionally designed to avoid the exact issue you describe.
If this was not done users of streaming services would have to be constantly adjusting the volume to deal with perceived volume differences between tracks due to different levels of dynamic range compression.
I don't have to change the volume between shows. But for a while, every action show required I down volume the noisy bits and up volume the talking bits.
I understand dynamic range is a thing and people with reasonable stereos and a place to use them should enjoy. But in an apartment with a sleeping toddler I simply want to hear it without waking my kid.
I now run: Windows Loudness Equalisation, Clear Voice on the sound bar, every show is subtitles on.
Sure, peak-to-N-dBFS is not what the streaming services do. But what they do is not normalization.
I'm the author of a DAW that allows normalization, compression and loudness control. The first one is more different from the last two than they are from each other.
>"Normalization" means applying some constant gain factor to the signal so that the loudest level is 0dBFS.
Not necessarily, although that has been perhaps the most common use of that term so far. But you can normalize to a lower peak level or to something else... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_normalization
I built modern thing a little like the old console stereo units. Used high end full-range drivers for the left/center/right and built in a sub. The thing looks like furniture but has your 3.1 covered. I think there's a Yamaha receiver in there but it isn't too crazy with regards to connectors and such.
I like to think the console stereo could come back for people who want higher quality speakers/audio.
I recently wanted up upgrade from 2 to 5 channels. Previously I just had 2 powered studio monitors hooked up to my tv via 1/8th inch. All I wanted was a D2A box that took the atmos signal and let me plug in more speakers. Turns out these are crazy expensive and it’s way cheaper to buy the giant box.
I am using my old Stereo, which has 5.1 support for the DVD and the TV. Way better than must friends soundbar. Maybe there are decent systems, but I doubt you can get as good as proper stereo stuff.
Sonos stuff is also outrageously expensive for mediocre audio quality. I have a really nice home theater from hand-me-downs, friend's basements, and yard sale finds, and sure I had to re-foam some woofers, but it sounds quite a bit better than anything Sonos offers.
But yes, I've always been an A/V nerd. Just like with Bose, it bothers me when there are companies that manage to market their way into getting people to buy a middling product for luxury money.
It sounds pretty good to me, and I didn't have to spend time re-foaming anything, or even wiring anything beyond finding power sockets. After I spent five minutes waving my iphone about in each room I have the system in, I don't have to worry about tuning it to the space or anything much else. Plus now with a few taps on my phone I can transport the tv sound into the kitchen and follow along when I'm cooking.
Ease of use and lack of time spent messing around with it, is absolutely part of the value proposition.
Because this isn't a hobby for me, or something I'm interested in spending time on. I want something fast, easy, convenient, with streams I can shift around the house at will.
If the sound is objectively 'middling', well so are my ears most likely. But given just how subjective I know most hifi/audiophile reviews and opinions are, I'm not really worrying about that.
The difference with Sonos compared to those speakers is that these are wireless and work very well together. They can play music from your TV and also virtually any other music streaming service directly from the app or through the native app itself (e.g. Spotify).
However, I'll never forget the big floor standing speakers my parents had and how great I thought they sounded. The difference was they were all wired to a receiver and if you wanted to add any additional speakers outside you needed to hardwire everything.
>Compact speaker systems like Sonos (that don't need a separate AVR) simply got good enough.
I don't like em. I am not the stereotypical smug audiophile but the sound on most of these new systems, soundbars, headphones, etc... is absolute trash.
Any pair of moderately-decent bookshelf speakers blows them out of the water and you can get them for ~300USD so they're actually cheaper than "high-end" speakers from brands like Bose, Sonos, etc... which sound terrible IMO.
About a year ago I tried the top-of-the-line soundbars from LG, Sonos, and Samsung respectively. They all went back to the store. A time-consuming, but worthwhile reminder of the adage you mention.
If AVRs are DSLRs, then Sonos is Leica, not the iPhone. Sonos is the expensive option that found & cemented a niche audience on an experience.
Soundbars are what's killing AVRs for what's left of the 'home theater' market. They're much easier to setup and deliver a good enough experience. For everyone else, it's laptops & tablets with maybe a pair of headphones.
As you say with DSLR, there is still a high end market but much much smaller than what mid-range audio used to be. I don't have any equipment myself now, but was considering buying one.
In that market, the big japanese brands (Onkyo, Marantz, Denon...) seem to have lost their way with mediocre products. Smaller British brands like Cambridge Audio or Rega may take their place (in a tiny market):
Are there any $15 wines that taste good or $500 DSLRs that can shoot good video footage or $50 dress shirts that look good? For most people the answer is obviously yes, and for some the answer is obviously no. And the one group will never convince the other group that they are wrong.
No. You can't change physics. What usually suffers is the midrange(woofer) because everything is tiny. So you get high frequencies, and then usually some paltry subwoofer. There is no replacement for displacement.
This!. I've been searching for a set of speakers for my lounge room with a nice big cone in them, but I just cant find that is not priced for audiofiles. I have been looking second hand, but everything I can find is over 40 years old and the cones have all started disintegrating.
If you have some diy desire and skill, you can get a lot of bang-for-your buck from the speaker kits from Parts Express (https://www.parts-express.com/speaker-components/speaker-sub...). The sound quality of their kits is surprisingly high! In addition, there can be a lot of satisfaction when you're listening to them, knowing that you built them yourself.
I actually bought a couple pairs of these Dayton bookshelf speakers with AMTs for surrounds with my Totem mains and center a few years ago. They sound fucking GOOD for $60. Far better than all this satellite and soundbar crap. If I was on an absolute budget, I'd get these as my mains, and the acoustech subs that I use for my computer($240) at the time. SOLID.
Yeh, unfortunately you're going to have to spend some bucks for quality. I'm still using my fathers 50 year old ESS Model 5's in my upstairs office and they sound amazing. Original woofers too! I just refoamed them, easy. I love the sound of the HEIL air motion transformers.
I'm in Australia, and there are still plenty of good options around.
I got a pair of Dali floorstanders for around AU$1000 a few years back on sale. The Dali Oberon (which I think is the replacement) is $1500 when not on sale right now.
You can get B&W 603s for under AU$3000.
Sure, you aren't getting a 12" woofer - but these are lovely speakers.
Oh yeah, I have a really nice set of JBL floorstanders in a 5.1 cinema set up I bought when I left home 30 years ago but I have never been fully satisfied with the sound. I'm sure its the mid range from the large cones that I'm missing.
The subwoofer I bought at the time doesn't have a large cone on it. The mistake I made I think.
I have a pair of ($30) Yamaha NS-BP200 and a 48 year old Sony STR-7045 ($50) and an Onko CP1200A (free).
They sound really good to me as the amp is really good at driving these speakers, and my Onkyo turntable benefits from excellent phono from the amp.
Of course, I can help you drop $50,000 easily on a system and you may still be unsatisfied.
I recommend setting a budget and just getting what you can. Also, the used market has amazing stuff. Have a look as well at NAD as they have some very small amps with phono and even subwoofer like D 3020 v2 or D 3045. Those are are very compact.
I also have an Onkyo TX-18 from 1990 that still works great.
The main reason why I got a Marantz AVR was to be able to connect 10 different devices to the TV at 4k@60 via HDMI, as well as various sound outputs, including the output of my music studio mixer.
Pretty much this. Places like Parts-express have been creeping more upmarket with their own brands like Dayton Audio to fill some of the gap, but they are still more downmarket hobbyist niche and probably won't ever be in mass market stores. The same thing that happened to cameras being replaced by good enough phones happened to stereos, just with soundbar/box type appliances.
This isn’t big news, the actual “Onkyo” that consumers know will carry on, the Bankruptcy is the remains of the company that had already sold off the hardware divisions.
“The company sold its core home audiovisual business to Sharp and U.S.-based Voxx International and its earphones and headphones business to an investment fund, both in September. A joint venture between Sharp and Voxx is expected to continue using the Onkyo brand”
I was window shopping for an atmos receiver and noticed the manuals and even product design between a certain Onkyo and Pioneer receiver were basically identical.
The design of the manuals, including the fonts and screenshots were almost identical. The back and front of the units were almost identical. I bet even the guts were identical!
Bankruptcy in Japan doesn't work the way it does in the West - it's pretty much a death sentence commercially in Japan. The brand will never be used again and the assets will be liquidated. The loss of face and reputation makes it very different.
Whats the good of licensing a brand if the company was known for high quality products? Its kind of like how toshiba made laptops 25 years ago that still work today but now they just license their name out to be stamped on cheap crappy laptops that barely make it through their warranty period.
Did you just answer your own question? It is precisely for that purpose - to give the impression that this lesser-known manufacturer produces goods with the original quality level of the licensed brand.
Eventually, consumers catch on:
> but now they just license their name out to be stamped on cheap crappy laptops
The whole comment is me presenting my case for why these brands should just die instead of having their logo pasted on chinese crap to deceive consumers
Theres a whole burgeoning trend of chinese manufacturers buying the licensing rights to defunct brands and putting the eerily branded goods up on amazon.
> Bankruptcy in Japan doesn't work the way it does in the West
Doesn't work in which part of the way it does work in the West?
Is the brand part of the assets and impossible to be sold - as a brand - locally or globally as part of the liquidation with this Onkyo bankruptcy in Japan?
Right, the big news was that it was already sold off months ago. But just because Sharp / Voxx is going to reuse the brand name (and likely some base IP) that doesn't mean people won't notice. (It's not likely anyone has noticed yet, since it takes until the next production or two to actually make cost / design changes).
> the actual “Onkyo” that consumers know will carry on
I’m not so sure. The mainstream market (by that I mean excluding expensive “high-end” brands like NAD) can’t support a lot of independently designed products. In the AVR mainstream market there’s currently Denon/Marantz, Onkyo/Pioneer, Sony, and Yamaha (did I miss any?). There’s bound to occur more consolidation if the market keeps shrinking. The brands may continue to exist, but sharing the internals with other brands.
Depends what you consider mainstream - the licensing gouged for everything from HDMI to Atmos, DTS:X, and so on means that there aren't as many price differences as there used to be, so anything above (e.g.) bare-bones Denon will be in the same price bracket as NAD and Anthem (for example).
Then you get into the exotica such as Trinnov, Storm, etc.
This. The final ignoble nail in the coffin of folks saying "Hey, I remember Onkyo: I'll buy this storied brand's products" in the futur and feeling miserable after getting a cheap junky product.
There is a special place in hell for brand destroyers: it's bad enough when the original company does it, but to have a licensee skate on nostalgic happiness only to slam you with their blade... Consumers deserve better.
They screwed up their receivers circuit board from 2009 to 2015 ish. All their receivers would fail after 5 years and Onkyo did a massive recall campaign to replace the main circuit board (with all the amps attached.) That must have costed them.
The Wikipedia article is wrong - it only talks about "the capacitor plague" of water-based elcos from 1999 onwards.
There have been multiple capacitor plagues. E.g. in the late 80s/early 90s SMD electrolytics entered the market and these had absolutely atrocious reliability because their lead seals kept failing, so they'd empty their electrolyte into the PCB. Before that the Japanese brands had a plague. Philips "blue axials" had a plague in the 70s/80s. I don't remember the brand right now (small, red-cased caps), which also had a plague in the 80s. Rifa MP safety caps have had moisture ingress issues and associated explosion and fire issues since forever.
Uh, I have a TX-8020 from around that time. Nothing fancy, and I don't use it too much as it's not in my main setup. So far it has developed only one quirk: the power button doesn't work properly, you have to press it several times or in a certain spot for it to react, and sometimes, when you want to turn it off it instead says "tone mode: direct" in the display, as if I had pressed another button. Still not sure if this is a mechanical or circuit board problem.
Sad to hear. Growing up I had an Onkyo amplifier that I liked a lot. I picked it up at a garage sale for a few dollars and used it through my teenage years.
All these cost about thirty thousand dollars including appropriate amplification and tax before installation. I make this a loss leader run by all the industry for labor and materials only. Every one is a halo product and worthy of that description.
Audiophiles, aka audio nerds, have always given me a chuckle in a good spirited way. The Ocean Way link is a great example. Just look at the image of that mix bay. The first one looks normal-ish with a left-front and right-front cluster and assumingly a matching center channel right in front of the console. Alongside that center channel is probably a few near field L/R pairs. So far, so good. Scroll down though, and we start to see the where the -phile takes over. The introduction of the side speakers are where the true geeky levels start oozing. You can see the side channels in pair of near field speakers as well as the rear surrounds in the very top of the image. However, it's the fact that there's now a bit of rigging brought in to fly a couple of speakers directly overhead. I'm also guessing there are more speakers on the rear wall that were not in the frame. I'm guessing it sounds pretty amazing, but no mere mortal can afford the home version of that making it well outside the acceptability of main stream. Hence the plight of DVD-Audio.
I am always amazed at the sound field imaging that can be created from some very well produced stereo. Just 2 n-way speakers, a good amp, and the mind of a great engineer.
When I discovered full-range I disavowed multiple drivers, crossovers.
Try it sometime. It's like headphones without the headphones. Crossovers + multiple drivers kill phase information and you throw the "sound stage" out the window.
Full-range speakers have many problems, that's why we use multiple drivers in the first place.
Well designed speakers don't destroy the phase either, and even if they did, which they don't, there's also active crossovers that can do all kinds of fancy stuff.
Nothing's perfect, but multi-way speakers are a much better solution than expecting a single speaker go from 30-20000Hz.
You keep stating this phase destruction like it is gospel. However, if a crossover is negatively affecting the phasing, something is wrong. Maybe it's a cheap design on a cheap product, or a poorly made something with a good design, but if you have a crossover doing this, then replace the crossover.
Many many sound systems do not have this issue that you seem to be convinced is normal operation of a crossover. If this was a normal thing and accepted by everyone everywhere, then loud music would never sound right. I'd suggest stop buying equipment from Radio Shack ;-)
It appears it is possible to create a crossover that preserves phase but it is difficult. Most designs instead try to minimize the phase difference. (And the worse crossovers don't bother at all.)
Regardless, as soon as I listened to full range drivers (with no mid-range, crossovers, etc.) it was clear nothing I had listened to before could compare.
> It appears it is possible to create a crossover that preserves phase but it is difficult. Most designs instead try to minimize the phase difference.
This is correct, I'm not convinced being slightly out of phase is a big issue though, and wildly out of phase shouldn't happen in a good design. Full range drivers have other issues, there is no way you can construct a chassis that is equally good at reproducing bass and treble as a n-way system, and its usually the treble that suffers. This is why commercial coax systems often are layered two-way systems, eg the KEF LSX50. I'm not saying what you are experiencing isn't real, but if there weren't pros and cons then high-end Hifi (as opposed to PA) speakers would have moved to that concept, which they haven't.
Maybe what you are experiencing is due to better dispersion. You can improve that in n-way systems by adding strong chamfers to the enclosure, see popular DIY projects Disco-M [0] or LYC [1] or DXT-MON[2] (phase chart at crossover included in comment).
It's too bad Denon (DENki ONkyo) didn't buy this Onkyo to make the merger complete :). I'm guessing it wasn't worth it to go downmarket via Onkyo, and it sounds like Onkyo had been accumulating debt for years.
Denki Onkyo and Onkyo were two different companies. "On" is an obsolete / traditional pronunciation of "sound" so it's not surprising to find it in many audio company names.
The point is that it's very much alive in the Japanese language. Aside from 音響
(onkyou) itself, there are a multitude of sound-related compounds, such as the even more common 音楽 (ongaku, music). In fact, the very word for Sino-Japanese pronunciation (音読み, on'yomi) uses this as well.
Given all this, I would find "obsolete" a misleading descriptor. For that matter, I'd find "traditional" misleading as well, as that could refer to the native Japanese pronunciation (kun'yomi).
They aren’t - denon and marantz merged. Poster was just suggesting D&M could have acquired them. But given the overall stagnation in the receiver market I agree it think wouldn’t have benefited anyone.
The market segment for Onkyo just doesn’t exist anymore - those that want receivers and a HiFi/HT setup are already well served Denon/Marantz and Yamaha (and the “audiophile” world beyond that is a pretty well saturated market). Sony is still around but that’s clearly not their core business.
But the former Onkyo base has been eroded by soundbars and wireless multi speaker setups.
I bought a new Marantz receiver a few years ago. Technically, it's great! 4K60Hz on multiple outputs and drives 7 speakers. It's less powerful (W per channel) than the previous Marantz I had (SR8000). The remote and the case feel very cheap, though.
Not going to complain much, I put it in a covered shelf, so I don't have to see it much and it automatically takes input from the TV most of the time. Just shame about not being better about that detail.
Qualitywise you can argue that (I have a Denon AVR from 2013 and even then the Marantz brand was just an expensive looking case around the same electronics), but branding wise Marantz is the high end and Denon is the lower end.
I had an Onkyo 5.1 system in service from 2002 - 2018. Great stuff! First movie I watched on the system with a 28" CRT TV was "Driven" on DVD. Going from TV-speakers to a full set of speakers including subwoofer was amazing! Later on it serviced Blu-ray:s and a PS4 beautifully.
I must say this is a rather sober ending to the week, and for the company. For a company that lived for over half a century - that is a lot of people who've lived their entire lives working at that place. Households that were purely supported because of people buying their audio gear.
I'm not a fan of Onkyo specifically - having never used them, or even had the money to buy proper audiophile gear - but it is a bit sad to see once-great industries and companies slowly start fading and dying off, as gradually fewer and fewer people remember them.
After getting a set of Sonos speakers in my living room I couldn't bring myself to just pawn off my Onkyo TX-NR626 and Polk speaker set, so now I've put them to use with my work setup and gaming rig. My PC games sound pretty good now, as do standup meetings!
When my Onkyo finally gives up the ghost, which could be in 2 years or 20 years based on what I'm reading in this thread, I'll be looking for whatever gives pretty good audio quality while having an absolute minimum of IoT cruft.
This and many other "japanese luxury products" will for sure go down the drain when for a drop of 5% in quality (which is already quite subjective) you could get virtually the same product in other brand for about 60% of the price, this (pretentious) focus on the details will kill many of those products/brands
It is weird this. I have just been trying to juggle a few home systems. I have pretty good bulky amps, but the problem is, they are bulky. And the inferior soundbar gets more use, as Bluetooth is convenient. I also have a dlna renderer with an onboard DAC, but the software is abandonware, and client support for dlna is just horrible. Particularly dlna controllers. Not sure why it is so utterly terrible, license fee induced hellscape? Casting could be good, but software support is all over the place, not to mention hardware.
Quality mini-amps with some over the air playback options. And polished/supported software would go a long way. I am getting so infuriated by the landscape, I am tempted to just buy active speakers.
Oh and only two devices I have have ever had, kind of play okay with Bluetooth When it works, it is good.
Shame you can't easily get diagnostic/feedback, about codecs and transport. Let alone volume.
I had sensitive ears when younger, probably lost a lot of my hearing. And the biggest annoyance ainhave with the TV is just trying to hear dialogue. The soundbar I have is good at background music in shows, and okay for music, but dialog it sucks at.
My onkyo GA speaker is okay for some types of music, sucks with others, and is terrible again for voice/podcasts etc. Different domains, I understand that. But not even configurable eqs.
Looking at this with sadness from the point of view of being a Rotel preamp+amp owner with equally old Infinity speakers. Onkyo has had some quality products over the years.
The Kappas all lost their surrounds but was able to replace them 15 years ago - they came back better than new, and still sound amazing.
Preamp only has a DB25 connector for 5.1 surround; hooks up to RCA outputs on an archaic, yet high end ASUS Xonar sound card. And all of my media goes through my 10 year old Windows 10 HTPC (recently refurbished with a new case, cooling and storage) and controlled by a Logitech wireless keyboard.
I love watching movies, YouTube etc on my 6 year old 65" Samsung that's simply a dumb display like that. Couldn't be easier to use; very performant. Beats a "tv app only" experience out of the waters.
There's a reason there are barely any double-blind tests on Hifi equipment. The difference just isn't there anymore. The entire market is full of bullshitters trying to sell you cables for USD 1k. Being "into Hifi" is basically a psychological diagnosis.
There's massive and audible differences between speakers, but it's difficult and time-consuming to do good blind ABX testing.
If you look into Harman preference score, that's the only real published stuff.
The room will also make a massive difference and probably needs room treatment.
I agree with you about electronics however... everything is so good now, well-designed amplifiers and electronics have ruler-flat frequency response. Amplifiers, cables and electronics are the last place people should spend money trying to improve their system.
Oh wow! I had an Onkyo AVR that did have Audyssey (TX-SR508), but I guess they stopped putting it into later models awhile ago. They replaced it with something called AccuEQ which some reviewers say works just fine.
I personally switched over to Denon AVRs when it became time to upgrade.
I believe Onkyo never had Audyssey XT32 (which is the Audyssey version you really want), only an older Audyssey version (2Eq). Onky never even had MultiEq? (not sure)
How hard would it be for them to just take their existing stereo and hook it up to alexa or sonos or some other existing streaming service. If the audio quality is good then quality + decent interface seems straightforward?
Many modern receivers support both Chromecast and Airplay, as well as some level of HomeKit / Google Home / Alexa integration.
I think for Onkyo, they just fell in an awkward middle. Not as high end as Denon/Marantz/etc. and not as cheap as < cheapest thing you can find >. Combined with the drastic decrease in people "needing" receivers and speakers (many people now just get a sound bar, or Bluetooth speakers) and the market squeezed them.
The middle of the market is actually all messy generally these days. The very high end wants systems that feel like current systems, but if you want something in the middle, you don't actually really want the awkwardness associated with having an audio system today.
A system of passive speakers, an amplifier or two, and the complexities of the user interface (I can't hear the TV, which of these three remotes do I need to push the "source" button on?) isn't actually a good experience -- and in the middle of the market, there's no particular reason it needs to stay this way.
At the highest end, people want analog sound processing. At the bottom end, we have cheap powered smart speakers using Bluetooth for connectivity. In the middle, we could easily have good quality powered speakers and some reasonable mixture of wireless and wired interconnect that didn't require all the legacy nonsense of a separate amplifier/audio receiver.
I always felt like it was a battle for control of the user interface.
When the system was audio-dominant, the receiver made sense to put in control. The TV audio was one source among many, and most of the functionality was in front-panel buttons.
When it became video-centric instead, we started putting the TV in the centre of the experience-- plugging devices directly into it and using its menus to control switching. The problem there is that anything cool the AVR could do by being aware of different inputs is lost (I'm picturing per-input volume controls, for example). There's not really a great way to get them to communicate-- CEC is limited, I've seen AVRs that do on-screen display and wish I hadn't seen it, and the only way I can imagine it working would be a single brand-based propriatery interface where all the parts could cooperate.
The one I find weird is the soundbar angle. It's not going to be anywhere near as good as all but the worst free-standing speakers, due to size and positioning limits, but it's still introducing cost and complexity. Bluetooth speakers, at least you could put them in a good place for the room. I assume they trade mostly on what they used to call "Wife Acceptance Factor"
The thing about Sound bars is that they're dead easy.
The sit physically near the TV and either plug directly into the TV or are Bluetooth. They don't need a receiver or any complicated wiring or configuration.
You open the box, set it up in 5 minutes, and have sound way better than the built-in TV speakers. No weird mounts, no wires in the walls, no three remotes. Super easy and sound pretty decent.
There are products there… plenty of good powered monitors available. Some of them have integrated DAC with an optical, line and USB inputs. Those are pretty easy to connect to a TV or whatever.
I’m actually hacking on a project to make it easier to sift through all this stuff. The work that Audio Science Review and a (very) few others are pumping out some great objective data on audio equipment performance. My goal is to pull that together in a data-first way that will allow for robust cost/quality/criteria queries.
yeah. i mean i understand the value of being able to replace components, but for the not-super-concerning the integrated amp silicon is just fine. digital in means a lot less opportunity for noise injection, and the manufacturer gets to tune it all as a unit.
i got some prosumer roland monitors a few years ago and they've had excellent clarity, flat frequency response, plenty of power at 60w on each of the drivers.
why aren't there more products here between the crappy little usb speakers and the $5k/channel real gear?
> I can't hear the TV, which of these three remotes do I need to push the "source" button on?
I have a fairly dumb amplifier (it does BT, and the DAC can be fed through optical and coax, too). It can also be controlled over RS-232 and Ethernet. It doesn't have any kind of HDMI or other "home theater" related functions.
But the remote of my Fire TV can be configured to control the input and the volume of this amp. So if all I want is to watch a movie or something, I only need to reach for the amp's remote to turn it off when I'm done. If I'm too lazy, it can go to standby on its own if it doesn't get any input for a while.
I do agree, though, that a "normal person" would probably not want it. It's quite big and not particularly pretty. Plus it's useless on its own, you need some kind of source to feed it. A soundbar or some active speakers would be best for them, and it's what they usually choose.
modern day i expect to not have to turn off/on my receiver: it should wake on input and go into a standby state after so much inactivity.
hence my problem: i’ve got the Technics receiver + stereo speakers i inherited, but if you leave the receiver on for more than a couple days without explicitly venting it’ll cut out (even if it’s inactive: its idle power draw is incredible). that’s fine for me, but if i’m the only one who cares about audio, it’s a hassle for everyone else in the house to manually flip the rocker switch on as they use the tv and off when they’re done.
now i think about it, there’s probably some “smart outlet” i could get to make this transparent.
Mine does wake on input, but it doesn't change inputs automatically. So if it's off and I send sound to it on some input, it'll wake and set that input. But if it's already on on a separate input, it won't switch.
In my case, I turned that off, because I don't want it to randomly turn on while I'm away (it's connected to a computer I tend to leave on with spotify running). But the fire TV remote is actually able to tell it to switch to a specific input, which is exactly what I need, since that will also turn it on if it was off.
Shame, middle was right where I liked to be audio equipment wise. Ive had my Onkyo receiver for a long time, guess when I do finally replace it I’ll go high end.
Consider trying a current generation class D amp first. I switched to the SMSL SA-50 from a pretty decent Marantz. The SA-50 sounds MUCH better for a fraction of the price, and it's tiny and uses very little power.
Unfortunately AirPlay doesn't support Atmos music. Despite spending thousand dollar plus on a Denon and Klipsch setup, I quickly found out that my Apple Music Atmos songs play only as stereo using AirPlay. It's probably Apple's fault...but it reduced the value of my receiver for me. Buy a 7.1 channel setup and effectively listen to only 2 channels :/
Yeah, AirPlay is such a disappointment. I'm thinking about investing more heavily into Chromecast related things since they're more amenable to custom code. Unfortunately, there's no way I'll sign up for any Google-based music service (and I work for Alphabet!).
Edit to add: Dolby <anything> is also a bit of a fiasco. LG TVs went through multiple firmware updates to attempt to correctly negotiate Dolby Vision. I appreciate that they want to push audio / video quality, but it seems weird that the industry testing process for integration is so poor.
Spotify works great with Chromecasts. I'm still really bummed they killed the Chromecast audio.. there's workarounds but it was the perfect device IMO.
If you're a tinkerer there's also DIY solutions like running snapcast on a Pi.
I’m running strong with three chrome cast audios and a 1970’s sansui in my living room, a little speaker with line in for the outdoor system, and a jbl boom box with line in in the garage
It’s entirely limitations of Apple Airplay that are known and not new. Whether it’s Apples fault - I mean Airplay does what it says it does. Anybody that cares about would simply not use Airplay.
If you want to use Apple Music then the best bet is an Apple TV which can stream it over HDMI to the receiver.
But it’s not like there aren’t alternative music providers - Spotify, qobuz, tidal, your own pick your poison DLNA all +/- Roon.
I’m not an Apple fanboi but having to purchase an Apple TV when it’s pretty clear they’re a lifestyle brand just doesn’t make me feel too bad for anyone.
exactly! despite spending money on a receiver, TV (smart OLED), nVidia Shield and a bunch of speakers - i now have to buy yet another device (AppleTV) to be able to maximize my experience.
And? This is Apples business MO for nearly 40 years.
I don’t see any piece of Apple hardware there. The Shield in your setup is superfluous, no? Apple is a hardware company - they need you to buy at least something for that HT setup.
I mean use Apple Music or don’t, but this sounds a bit leopards ate my face.
That awkward middle also included the reputation that they would easily break down after a few years, which made many people choose for a different brand.
Most a/v units have long offered good connectivity and even mult-room setups using one. So, interoperability and connectivity are easy. Aside from reasons mentioned in the article, you now have 1-2 generations of people who grew up without having much exposure to a/v receivers and large speaker setups, whether at home or big box store electronic stores.
Even the ones who have, the marginal benefit of having pricier and higher end units cannot detected easily.
Market for receivers will always be around, but it is shrinking for sure.
Detecting differences between decent gear blind has never been terribly relevant to the audiophile market :-)
That aside though, a stereo setup is something that a lot of people just had. I have a decent one and it’s wired to multiple rooms. If I were starting from scratch I almost certainly wouldn’t do that today—to say nothing of all the components to play four or five different types of media.
I have one. It’s a mini system (CS-N575) and it has both Spotify and Chromecast support but no AirPlay support.
I bought it because I wanted a small system for my office that I could stream to or play CDs. It works, but I wouldn’t really recommend it. It doesn’t sound great. I thought about buying better speakers but then then I looked up the amp specs and saw 10% THD. I think it’s just a mediocre system.
My circa-2015 Marantz receiver (NR1606) shipped with support for Airplay, Spotify, Pandora, and SiriusXM, so they’ve had decent connectivity with modern services for some time now. The UI isn’t amazing but that’s barely relevant since those services are typically streamed or controlled by a phone app.
Easy, with built-in Bluetooth. I run my phone with Spotify into my Costco-special Onkyo with Bluetooth. Works great, and I can even play audio with Bluetooth while viewing video through another HDMI port.
I switched to sonos and never looked back. I had a lot of Onkyo over the years and it always felt like they should have gone the software route much sooner.
ultimately i think smart tvs and roku were a bigger part of the receiver demise - it just didn’t fit the receiver mindset and the experience sucked
sonos wasn’t cheap but i’m on year 7 and it still works and i only saw one product refresh on soundbar but my old one still works - just sticking to spdiff. with 7 years of onkyo i would have been on 2nd or 3rd receiver just trying to stay ahead of dvd to bd and hdmi 1.x to 2.x and evrything between.
The convenience / sound quality balance has shifted because things like Sonos are very convenient, even though the sound quality has, if anything, gone down for the price. Certainly the convenience of streaming has curtailed the AVR market, since streaming has shit audio.
But SPDIF is limiting you to DD at best which is 640kbit/s IIRC. Steaming services are often DD+ which won't go over SPDIF. I've got discs, so looking at 18Mbit/s on some soundtracks. My $600 Yamaha amp was absolutely better than an SPDIF setup.
I never bought a single BD after wasting so much money on VHS and DVD collections and for streaming audio/video it works great. Eventually I'll go HDMI with CEC but the speaker will remain on another tv because it sounds so damn good.
> Sure. But that means tanking the quality. It doesn't magically keep the quality just because it started as DD+.
I'd say "marginally degrade" rather than tank. DD at 640 kbps is pretty close to transparent, and E-AC-3 to AC-3 transcoding uses hybrid recompression to avoid the full quality hit of lossless -> lossless.
I'm using a 7-year old Onkyo 7.1 surround sound system right now. It sounds great, but when you use the menus (like browse a DLNA server) or switch inputs (or something cuts out), there's a second or two lag on everything.
I wish that AV receivers had USB inputs for PCs.
"But Andrew," I hear you say: "Go to $store and search for receivers with USB ports. There's hundreds!"
Those USB ports are for playing MP3s off a flash drive. A PC isn't a flash drive. Do you have a receiver like that? How do you connect a PC to it with USB?
Get yourself some DAC like a Topping D10s. This specific model can also convert USB to SPDIF coax or toslink to connect in your receiver, instead of RCA analog.
I'm already using HDMI for 7.1 uncompressed PCM. I need to configure my receiver as an extra display just so an audio signal can piggyback off it. Thus, my desire for a simple USB connection.
I'm pretty sure my motherboard has SPDIF optical out, but SPDIF would be a downgrade since it only supports compressed 7.1 or uncompressed stereo.
If you kept CDs and want to play them, have DAB+ radio and need to receive it, and want something like Plex to not turn on a TV with chromecast, you wind up neeeding either to spend ludicrous sums on component Hi-Fi, or look for a receiver which has enough HDMI inputs to feed digital media in.
Yamaha, Onkyo and Marantz look to be the ones who occupy the space and include some DAB+ choices integrated into the unit, which reduces the backside plug count
So my world of "what do I buy next" just dropped down one provider. Bummer.
I had a high-end Onkyo and it travelled to 3 countries with me.
Until one time it was in storage and some water dripped in it and ruined the circuit board.
But MAN! I bought it with matched 7.1 speakers and remember setting it up, tuning it with the included microphone and plugging in the Avatar Blu-Ray. Jesus!
Now I'm with crap-shit Samsung soundbar in my house here in Asia, which I can't even turn up too much because I respect my neighbor. Too much bass. Not enough mids or highs. Sigh.
I have one from about 8 years ago. It’s good. But it has one infuriating issue: nothing tells you anywhere that your Component input (my Wii) will not EVER output to HDMI for the TV. I killed countless hours troubleshooting why I’d never get picture.
(yes there are technical excuses. This is a product design failure)
I was given an Onkyo TX-108 as a gift in the 1980s. I used and loved it up until I left the U.S. for good in 2006. I gave that receiver to my sister and she's still using it. Fantastic sound.
That's really too bad. I've been wanting to get a TX-RZ50 for a while but they've been non existent and I guess this is why. I've had a pre-order on one for five months and still no movement! Unfortunately any Denon model with reasonable preouts is a 2020 model with only one HDMI port that can run 4k 120hz HDR.
Some markets simply disappear. Ice was once a subscription business, but refrigerators ended it.
Average sound equipment is good enough for most people. I enjoyed the chest thumping that my parents high end setup could deliver, but not everyone wants that and even though I would like to have that kind of ability available, my priorities place it down the list for the foreseeable future.
expect more. Japan Inc. has been running on fumes for decades. The US only started 2 years ago, and will likely last another 20~40 years of stagnation.
The US has been talking about the "Japan [central bank] Model" as a model of success for much longer than two years.
This meme first got really big in central-banking circles after the 2008 crash. Japan has been following this model for 35-40 years of managed-decline. The US has been toying with the same model for more like 10-15 years than 2-3 suggested above.
The US so far has managed its decline better, but not for nothing has "abundance agenda" become a meme lately even on the left -- as more and more people sense that managing the decline is the goal of current policy and they don't actually want to decline.
The US has a healthy immigration system that brings in a consistent stream of workers and tax payers to support all the old people about to clog social assistance channels for decades. That's the strong trap that Japan has been stuck in for decades, and the one that'll start befalling China in a decade or so. It'll be interesting to see if Japan can escape the population deflation or if this is a constant shrinking population from here on out until it's untenable to continue as-is.
Ponzi schemes are good at kicking the can down the road but when they eventually collapse, they're orders of magnitude worse than they would have been if the core problem the scheme was implemented to address was just addressed when it first became a problem.
The fact remains that the US is in a far better position to deal with aging demographics than the majority of Western countries. Immagration policy needs to be adjusted as soon as possible as to not squander this.
Immigration isn't a ponzi scheme. It's a reasonable way to prevent a precipitous collapse in the ratio of workers to retirees as birth rates decreased.
Healthy immigration isn’t going to last much longer if the cons get back into power in 2023-2024, as seems likely at this point. Closing the borders will be a fantastic way to curry favor with the MAGA base, and the cons will have no excuse not to do it with Democrats completely out of power in every part of the government.
I’m not very knowledgeable about this, but I have friends and family in the UK and traveled there monthly for years, so not zero context: and for a country that went from the largest empire ever to a minor great power at best in like 50 years, it seems like a pretty attractive place to live all things considered. It’s got problems but not like 10x worse than any other developed nation.
Do you happen to know how they managed that decline without worse consequences?
Managing decline is not a plan for survival. No matter what you think of Trump, this was one of his primary policy issues, and is the basis for the "Make America Great Again" slogan.
The creedo has a more specific and probably incorrect message: " we are broken, we need to be fixed. (Implied) I'll fix things". It's easy to attract conservative minded people as a rally cry to your cause when you reach for a nostalgic rhetoric about "the good ol' days" fallacy. Much divergent from the often left leaning "we can build a better future" which should probably also be considered a fallacy.
Back on topic, I don't think the electioneering slogan had any actual policy significance.
Part of the experience with hobbies is some kind of sacrifice along with the reward. The drive towards convenience takes away that sacrifice and makes me appreciate something a little less.
It's like takeout and boxed wine, wearing a T-shirt; versus dressing up a bit, making a nice meal, and opening a bottle from a winery you visited. The former is ovjectively good and convenient, and all of the latter ceremony is a hassle that provides little benefit (you probably can't tell the boxed wine apart in a blind test).
But... aren't we happier with the latter experience?
I'm too lazy to "waste" time on that kind of happiness though. That's the sad part.
I think if I'm motivated by others it's different. For instance, stuff like surfing/snowsports requires a significant hassle, and it's a lot easier to find people who will put up with that hassle.