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Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#91

Post by colordrops »

chmod600 wrote: post #77

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…

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#92

Post by layer8 »

One reason I stopped buying Onkyo AVRs is that they don’t have a good room correction system like e.g. Audyssey or Dirac.

Edit: Apparently Onkyo caught up at some point, but at the time I switched away from them they were lagging behind regarding room correction.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#93

Post by Mountain_Skies »

adra wrote: post #67
codefreeordie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

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 p…

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#94

Post by JKCalhoun »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
codefreeordie wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true -- though the expectations we have for audio equipment has changed in ways that make what Onkyo was really good at less important.

The switch to little bitty teeny tiny speakers just makes me sad. I miss my towers with multiple drivers and crossovers accordingly.

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#95

Post by rob74 »

layer8 wrote: post #84
chmod600 wrote: post #77

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…

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 multiplicat…

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...

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#96

Post by initplus »

Fwirt wrote: post #75
rixrax wrote: post #59

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 monstr…

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 rang…

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#97

Post by user_7832 »

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#98

Post by 7speter »

wyldfire wrote: post #76
FunnyBadger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But doesn't the brand itself have value outside of Japan? When liquidating the company, why not license it to another manufacturer?

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#99

Post by 7speter »

layer8 wrote: post #92

One reason I stopped buying Onkyo AVRs is that they don’t have a good room correction system like e.g. Audyssey or Dirac. Edit: Apparently Onkyo caught up at some point, but at the time I switched away from them they were lagging behind regarding room correction.

> … Audyssey or Dirac

Gotta remember these names for when I can afford a good audio system…

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#100

Post by benreesman »

codefreeordie wrote: post #42
midislack wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we started our quest to double, triple, even quadruple the money supply.

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 fo…

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?

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