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".
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.