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.

By the way, I just checked the backplate and it's an Onkyo TX-9031 RDS receiver from 1993 - time just flies ...

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…

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'm very happy with this setup.

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.

I wonder what it sounds like. I might buy one just to find out.

https://emotiva.com/collections/amps/products/basx-a2m-stere...

I've had their XPA amplifiers for years and they work great, good value for the performance on a lot of the Emotiva gear

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.

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.

>But... aren't we happier with the latter experience?

No?

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.

Maybe other peoples metrics place greater weighting on ease of use.

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.

But I’m damn sure I’m really attentively listening to the music.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Excellent movie does not have to be "immersive". I think your statement sounds rather snobbish.

I believe it's related to the hyper-convenience of netflix and series with autoplay.

I guess you can call that snobbish, as well as my comment about boxed wine. But if so, I guess I'm making a case for snobbery?