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.
Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
201–210 of 297 posts
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
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…
> 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.
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#204I'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 f…
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.
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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…
> Aiwa Cassette deck won't play any cassette
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)).
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#206I 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…
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.
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#207After 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.
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 l…
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…
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.
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Aiwa Cassette deck won't play any cassette 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 the…
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
Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy
#210I 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…
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):
https://ware2go.co/how-cambridge-audio-leveraged-amazon-prim....