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Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

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Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#291
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The camera market has cratered, from 2010-2020 it dropped from 120 million units sold to under 10 million: https://www.popphoto.com/news/the-camera-industry-is-changin... The total market for all interchangeable lens cameras appears to be on the decline as well: https://1kcreatives.com/smartphone-vs-mirrorless-vs-dslr-cam... The point of the argument was that sonos and other smart speaker tech like sound bars etc, ha…

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…

> yes probably most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference on a smart phone small screen

This is the dismissive part. See, for instance -

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones-vs-cameras-closing-the-g...

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#292
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Edit] (large format) ,[/] Surround American made monitors designed by the Pet Sounds engineer Alan Sides. https://oceanwayaudio.com/as-the-sea-level-rises-for-immersi... British (also available in consumer version and pretty finishing): ATC SCM150 https://atc.audio/hi-fi/loudspeakers/classic-series/scm150/ American: JBL M2 https://jblpro.com/products/m2 (Or just buy JBL commercial theater smaller models like many in…

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…

You need much more than stereo for Atmos mixing, including overhead speakers.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#294

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#295
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower noise is not going to do much. Most of the noise in a modern camera at 'high' iso is present in the light signal you are capturing, rather than the result of a noisy amplifier. Light (the arrival of photons at a pixel) is approximately a poison process with the brightness being the arrival rate of photons. At low brightness, short exposure time, the variance in the total photons received at a pixel starts becom…

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.

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#296

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.

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".

Re: Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy

#297

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 o…

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 look…

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.
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