SMSL has some good, well reviewed products; as do WiiM and quite a few other brands.
The Audio Science Review forum (1) has objective measurement based reviews of many of the newer amps, standalone and integrated.
I’m using the SMSL AO300 to drive Boston Acoustics VR3 floor standing speakers in a study, and they’re sound as good as they did when they were on an older Yamaha amp, or a Denon integrated amp.
Edited to add: most (none?) of the class D integrated amps can’t do Dolby -(licensing, I suspect, is the main issue here), so you’ll need to get a receiver in the middle for HTS though.
Edited post edit (sorry!): turns out Wiim streamers can now do 5.1, so some options are slowly emerging. (2)
(1) https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?forums/am...
(2) https://faq.wiimhome.com/en/support/solutions/articles/72000...
I have an Anthem pre and an LG TV, both of which are blocked from accessing the internet, and I have none of these issues.
Back in the mid 80s I spent way more than was sensible and bought myself seperate NAD pre/power amps, Boston Acoustic Speakers, and a Rega turntable for my birthday. I not only still have and use all that gear, but have since bought more of the same brands 2nd hand mostly from the same era, so I now have 5.1 surround in my lounge room, and stereo amp/speaker sets in my kitchen, office, bedroom, and guest bedroom - all NAD/Boston Acoustic, and all capable of doing Apple AirPlay via Apple TV or old Airport Expresses.
Vintage hifi is great. You will probably need to become the sort of person who can replace all the electrolytic capacitors in your amps and speakers crossovers, or at least know someone who can. And you'll become the sort of person who'll hunt the internet for someone who can ship you replacement drivers for your speakers, styluses and drive belts for your turntable, and hifi grade capacitors (and you'll probably stock pile all of those those). It's at least partially a hobby instead of just appliances you own.
Sure, I spray it down with contact cleaner, and it fixes it for a few years each time, but the dial light bulbs are starting to burn out.
Most of its internals are hand soldered and switches /relays/etc that would be cheaper, better and more reliable with modern technology.
Even though it was hand wired, it didn’t cost much new (inflation adjusted), so why can’t anyone manufacture something with a similar amplifier but an automated assembly line and better control circuitry (and maybe a rpi header for electronic control) for, say, $1000 in 2025?
But the feelies are the hard part. An attractive bespoke case is expensive to build and ship. Some of the stuff (high-grade tuning capacitors) probably simply can't be had in quantity without opening a new production line.
I know there are a bunch of DIY kits that claim to be circuit-equivalent to popular vintage amplifier designs, and there's the Akitika range, but they're still not really a turnkey "it's your favourite vintage model, but with zero hours on it"
You can almost always replace knobs and switches, usually with high quality ones, if you're prepared to hunt around various internet sites to fond them (and often you need to be prepared to just buy something that looks like it's close and accept wasting the money if it doesn't quite fit).
FOr me, and for no real good reason, I prefer to keep my vintage hifi gear as "original" as possible, and I'm not personally interested in "upgrading" the guts. Having said that, I dfrunk-eBayed a really nice old 70s vintage New Zealand built/designed Perraux 2100EXR power amp a while back, assuming I could repair the listed faults - but it turns out too many of the internal components are completely obsolete and unobtainable, and I'm _strongly_ considering gutting it and filling the enclosure with modern class d amp modules. It _might_ become a 7 channel home theatre amp hidden behind the old 70s rack mount amp faceplate. That kinda feels too much like cheating though?
Exactly what I was thinking when you mentioned mid 80's vintage BA speakers. I have Missions from late 80's and I've had to replace the drivers twice. Also have a BA subwoofer that I should find a new driver for since it's now rattling like crazy.
The only issue is volume control, due to not having a remote for lazier folk. I can control it digitally but don't like "shaving" off bits to control volume.
Old article for background but if anything it’s even more common now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat...
So yes, you can probably shave off 3 seconds of boot time by never connecting your gadget to the internet.
gp is most likely using a display that quickly boots into "source" mode – think hdmi input
I'm not, honestly. Think of AVR-integrated radio receivers and hi-fi CD players: a typical appliance-grade (non-raster) VFD/LCD display is sufficient for navigating through radio stations and CD tracks; I will admit that Alexa-style voice-control can work quite well for online services like Spotify or Apple Music, but even then I find myself frequently needing to reach for my phone (and wait for Amazon's webview-based Echo app to load) for anything nontrivial.
While a good modern TV can show a picture from standby in a few seconds, it "feels wrong" to me to have to turn-on an eye-burningly-bright main living-room TV just to select a song to play.
Aside my guess is the Apple TV does usually work “headless” in OP use case with music playing controlled from his phone. One only needs a tv for streaming video (obviously) and I think for initial setup.
It’s actually insane to me.
I have my AM on my Sonos, my phone, my ATV, and my dad’s Sonos and have never seen a message that it’s playing elsewhere. With Spotify my setup absolutely would be impossible using the same account.
I personally don’t want the Spotify style playback features; keep them out of my AM please.
Edit: I forgot you can also now share a queue via Apple Music using airplay, even if others at the party don’t have an account.
If you want to stay within the Apple ecosystem without the TV part, you could use an AVR with airplay built-in. Or get an AirPort Express, which can join a wifi network and become an Airplay client, and connect it via optical (mini toslink) to an AVR. And control it all from a phone or Mac.
Unfortunately as of a few years ago Google TV/Android TV forces ads for useless content in the home screen, taking up bandwidth and slowing load times. The 'dumb' Chromecasts can still talk to the AVR over HDMI-CEC to turn on power, adjust volume, etc.
For me, I reckon less than 5k overall. JVC DLA-X5000 projector, Yamaha A1020 receiver, Focal Aria 936 speakers, SVS SB1000 sub, Raspberry Pi 2 with Kodi on it, a NAS with 16TiB of storage and gigabit networking to connect it all. All the AV stuff second hand, of course. No load times, no ads, just a system that works for me.
I do not accept technology into my life unless it works for me. If the latest nK formats and 1000 channel surround doesn't work without equipment that works for someone else than I'll never have it in my home. Simple as that. I'll read a book instead.
isn't like this our goal here??? I mean we are comment on YC site that produce startup aiming just that
Generally though, consumers have already spoken with their wallets on this topic and they have told many thousands of doe-eyed founders loud and clear: “we will happily sacrifice our time and privacy to save a $3, bring on the ads”
Hence why YC focuses on B2B Saas for B2B Saas companies who sell to other B2B Saas companies.
I don't know, going back years ago, if anything it would have been YC figuring how to push ads/bloatware. It would have just been more subtle about the phrasing and meaning behind what was trying to be accomplished, but the underlying 'value extraction' stories were still there.
The "entrepreneur" aspect of YC generally was about "enshittification" before that word became more used.
However it could be certain headlines attract a certain type of person, allowing for an entirely different subjective experience of what "people on hacker news" are like.
Abusing customers as a business model should not be legal. It's not ethical to begin with, actually, and applauding this practice is interesting.
NO! I've been here long enough to remember PG saying to build something people WANT. YC has become less about technical founders building an MVP and more about the investors finding something they can make money from. The later often depends on "monetization" which has become the driver of enshitification, which is precisely the opposite of what people want and the antithesis of what YC once was.
My TV is just a rather basic chinese 75" TCL, and I have absolutely 0 zilch ads anywhere apart from actual Google products (youtube of course but thats a terrible experience anywhere without ublock origin or similar, and OS showing on the background in main menu ads for their paid movies - the place I spend maybe 3s during start if at all and they don't even look like ads just background). If I launch straight ie netflix 0 nanoseconds spent seeing ads. If I play from USB there is nothing. And this is rock bottom chinese stuff.
Turning on TV which is in sleep mode is like 2s max, another 2s and soundbar is on automatically via eArc.
I used to have B&W towers with Pioneer receiver (bought for peanuts, older tech sounds 100% as new one) but then I realized they add friction to whole experience and I prefer a small notch lower sound quality to convenience and surround. Samsung soundbar with that TV does that 100%. Apart from playing music only I don't even notice the difference.
Is this maybe region specific behavior? I live in Switzerland, US consumers are widely known to accept way more ads than other western countries, plus there is a lot of wealth in that single market.
Have a 10TB movie collection on an external HDD (mostly 1080p x265 rips and few 4K ones) but its less convenient and I have to download new stuff myself. Plus I love standup collection Netflix has.
Total price cca 1.5 years ago - cca 1700$ and a proper cinema experience.
Beyond the speaker and amplifier of your choice (both dumb! or dumbed down) a few hundreds of USD and couple of weeks or months of learning and tinkering with low cost hardware and open source software for HiFi use. Some Raspberry Pis and matching DAC allowed me to have a very decent experience I needed (around KEF speakers). There were dead-ends, confusions, restarts, dubious or closed down solutions offered but you will rely moslty (not completely) on your own in the end if done right, and not exposed to the mercy of ruthless conglomerate assoles that much.
What does this mean?
Chinese copies + Amazon = flood of shit
It takes years to design, test, build prototypes, measure, re-design, re-build, calibrate, certify and produce a good hifi audio amp. That means you start your product journey with $500k in debt and unless you can show how you're going to sell enough units to recover this, your project is dead before it ever started. You typically need to sell at 8x of your real costs, because shipping companies, import agents, wholesalers and retailers all want (and need) their margins. If I expect to sell 2,000 units per month (which is A LOT already) for 2 years, then I need to add about $10 to my costs per unit to recover the R&D expenses. And that means as long as Amazon is happy to turn a blind eye on IP-infringing blatantly obvious clones that typically even re-use my product images or slogans or brand names ... then my "original" product will be undercut by $10x8 = $80 in price by Chinese clones. They don't have R&D to recoup because the can just buy my product, x-ray the PCB, and then make duplicates. And trying to get Amazon to follow the law is like playing expensive whack-a-mole with lawyers. It won't help to recover money.
That means as the manufacturer, I have exactly 1 way left to recover R&D expenses:
I lock down the software. And then I either shove ads in your face, or I bully you into a subscription. Or if the ads pay too little, both.
I hate the situation as much as you do, but I also see no better way forward. Nowadays, you need to plan for the flood of shitty clones on Amazon a week after launch. (Or in some cases, even before the original product clears import customs.) And that means you treat hardware as cheap and disposable, because your competitors do that and unless you join them, you're at a huge market disadvantage, because the average customer cannot tell the difference between a low-quality and a high-quality capacitor. (And Amazon doesn't care.)
https://www.cultofmac.com/news/selfie-stick-iphone-case-gets...
(And please note that these guys even had US patents on the product. Didn't help them, though.)
Too much effort when they can just go to the company making them and get cheaply made copies :)
To give you some price ideas:
10x10cm 4-layer PCB x-ray and RE: $200
STM32 firmware dumping: $700
EEPROM dumping: $300
The STM32 is the most expensive because you need to decap them to get the hardware encryption key. But it's still A LOT cheaper than building your own firmware from scratch.
Sure, there is some boot up time to warm everything up, but there are no ads and no user agreements etc on mid to high end systems.
Even my entry level system (denon avr, lg c1 oled, appletv4k and ugoos as media players) does not take more then 10 seconds from totally off to showing the menu / plex interface, and no user agreement popups or ads
My system is very similar to yours. I’ve got a UHD player, XBox, Plex Server, and a half-dozen retro gaming systems in the mix. But apparently I'm not as patient as you (and others that responded) are.
I find 10 seconds to be intolerable and unnecessary. I’m old enough to have been spoiled by the analog world where power meant you were ready.
Not only is the time-to-wait painful, occasionally the HDMI handshake fails or the TV powered on quicker than the receiver’s signal was output and its input selection “picks” the wrong input or wrong display settings. So now you have to consider the order you’re powering things up, because the TV is “smart” and if you tell it to choose an input that isn’t ready, it’ll self-select one it thinks is ready.
And if I’m using HDMI-ARC, which I frequently do when using an over-the-air signal, if the TV powers on sooner than the receiver, the TV falls back to its own speakers. So now I’m stuck navigating the TV menu to get the audio through my SVS speakers instead of the ones in the TV.
Occasionally my TV has an “update” and then its apps have updates and then the update presents a new “user agreement” with all the data harvesting options pre-selected. If I don’t use my system frequently, two of the devices in the chain may want to update!
And after all that, if I’m watching physical media I then have to wait for the disc to be read and navigate through forced ads or trailers or piracy warnings. If they aren’t forced, I still have to intervene to skip them and get to the menu. But don’t select anything too fast on the menu! It has its own animations it wants you to watch before it will show you what options you have.
And all of that whining doesn’t even cover the wasteland of options available to remote control and make sense of the Rube-Goldberg AV system. The best option (Logitech Harmony) bailed leaving consumers with nothing but the Chinese schlock that hollowed out the market in the first place.
Logitech stopped selling new harmony remotes, but all the infra to configure them is still online and managed by them, and as soon as you have configured the hub, it does work totally standalone. I'll worry about another brand when I buy new hardware and the harmony configuration infra is no longer online (I'm pretty sure there will come an opensource alternative)
About the update: the secret here is 'dont connect your tv to the internet, there is 0 use for that'
On Logitech, for one system I still use a Harmony One that was gifted to me in 2008! I bought a Harmony Elite (and hub) off Ebay a few years ago for my upscale system.
It feels like there's definitely an opportunity for someone to build remotes or an orchestrator for A/V systems that works well.
Little harsh, but yeah.
People are in here saying, "I love controlling receiver through my Apple TV!" That's why we are where we are. Apple may be good right now, but may not be forever. People literally ask for this stuff to be integrated, buying Sonos systems that brick and what not. It's too bad.
Disclaimer: I have booth systems in parallel and I feel disgusted and disappointed every time I have to use the Sonos system now.
I use a Frame and don't have any of the issues you describe in the slightest.
The power button turns the TV on with a 0.5 second animation, and immediately I see the Roku interface with no popups or Samsung branding or anything.
Probably the ONLY complaint is that by default my washing machine puts an alert on the TV every time it's finished.
I would probably find the setting to turn it off but honestly part of me finds it very cool for my washer to creep onto the TV because it knows I'm watching.
EDIT: maybe you are using wifi? It's the only thing I can think might be different in my setup. Try running RJ45 and see what happens? All I can say is Works On My Machine unless you add some details
On top of that, its harvesting the hell out of your data.
Stop being a sucker. Toss that Roku powered shit out of the window.
2-3 second boot up. No ads. Snappy interface. No complaints. No bloatware. No adware.
Why does this solution not work for you?
Does your TV not work when you turn off WiFi with an attached Apple TV? I’m confused.
Roku is breaking things constantly. If you ever have to replace that hardware, it will have more up to date software and your experience will be broken. This will be by design.
Even implying that somebody should consider buying Roku hardware at this point is stunningly irresponsible. In the last few weeks they broke HDR. Before that they broke the ability of their TVs to display content properly when using apps on the built-in OS due to some new craptacular frame rate feature they pushed out and have refused to roll back. Thankfully I can work around it on my Apple TV by turning on Game Mode for the input. They are currently testing a wide variety of invasive ad features that you can be damn sure will destroy your experience once they officially roll them out.
They harvest every bit of your data and sell it to whomever will pay.
Roku is a stunningly objectionable company. On top of all that (as if it wasn't enough), their platform lags behind everybody else. They refuse to license a full range of video codecs so pieces of software like Channels DVR will never work on their platform. Not to mention that when you run a Roku TV that isn't connected to the Internet, you lose the ability to customize various aspects of it. You can't rename the inputs for example.
Nobody should ever even imply that somebody should buy a Roku device. They are crap and there is virtually no chance of the company changing course.
They are a poster child for enshittification.
From day 1, all smart TVs had horrible latency when it comes to navigating through menus and screens. I'm glad for that, because it stopped me from ever buying one in the first place!
Maybe it's the people that show up at best buy without doing any research and just buy the most expensive TV not realizing it's a crappy smart TV. Who knows. Do your research!
...I want it.
Get a Yamaha [0], NAD [1], Rotel [2]?
I would have adamantly said AKAI, but they are no more.
[0]: https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/hifi_components...
[1]: https://nadelectronics.com/product/c-3050-stereophonic-ampli...
Edit: Immediately after posting this I scrolled down and saw "The C 3050’s industrial design was inspired by the NAD 3030 Stereophonic Amplifier, a 1970s classic" which explains the look!
Yesteryear's HiFi equipment was something else.
Not much. Buy used. Buying new stereo equipment is an activity of the wealthy. Everywhere I've ever lived, CraigsList is overrun with excellent used speakers and receivers at reasonable prices.
I won't inundate you with brand-flexing, but I'll say I'm very happy with my home theater system. 4K OLED TV, big ol' tower speakers, and a pretty nice home theater unit. All from reputable brands. All used. Under $400 all together. No shitware.
Also gotta add, if my B&W speakers started playing ads at startup, Id be fucking livid!
Radiotehnika Audio Goldline 90
;-)
And, to be fair, not all new stereo equipment is malware-infested trash. I'm sure there are plenty of new receivers that quietly go about their job - but not from Samsung subsidiaries, apparently.
Now if only the Logitech Harmony remotes would come back.
Why on earth do you say that? :))) I got a nice Samsung 12" tablet, and a nice Samsung (work) smartphone. After 20-30mins of disabling bloat/crap-ware their batteries last a week on stand-by.
Projector (Optoma laser) - $1200
110" powered retractable projector screen - $100
Mid tier PC - $600
DAC (Schiit modi 2) - $180
Amp (Behringer A500) - $100
SVS prime towers - $1000
SVS Sub - $750
All of my music is running off Jellyfin. I have a turntable that barely gets used but that's because I don't have enough space for it to keep it out of the reach/ damage radius of my kids.
You can of course do this for much less if you don't spend 2 grand on the audio part.
No Bloatware.
How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experience? Just like every retailer has embraced usury with their credit card programs, every technology company has decided they are in the data harvesting business. I’m so over it.