8 ms·
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 enou
by rixrax 4y ago
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 monstrosity that they can hardly ever enjoy...because too small of a listening room, and neighbours).
I'm not saying market for Onkyo, Denon, Sony, Yamaha, etc. AVRs is a goner, but I am suggesting it may have peaked and that going forward there will be less and less demand for AVRs, especially in the low/mid range of things.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoAre there any of those compact speaker systems that actually sound good, though?
- gog 4y agoSony HT-A9 (+ a sub) has been praised, but it is not cheap.
- KerrAvon 4y agoSony’s speaker quality isn’t great. Had to replace an HT-5000 sound bar last year because the center began distorting.
- msh 4y agoMost people think so. Audio nerds don't.
- philjohn 4y agoYes - the Sonos Arc + sub + 2 rear channels sounds amazing after using the built in sound tuning, and got a pretty damn good review in What HiFi.
- aurora72 4y agoEven the USB powered Logitech z120 which costs a few dollars sounds good enough even for movies.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI guess you watch movies where all the dialogue takes place over a telephone and there's no music?
- dagw 4y agoAre there any $15 wines that taste good or $500 DSLRs that can shoot good video footage or $50 dress shirts that look good? For most people the answer is obviously yes, and for some the answer is obviously no. And the one group will never convince the other group that they are wrong.
- overcast 4y agoNo. You can't change physics. What usually suffers is the midrange(woofer) because everything is tiny. So you get high frequencies, and then usually some paltry subwoofer. There is no replacement for displacement.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoThis!. I've been searching for a set of speakers for my lounge room with a nice big cone in them, but I just cant find that is not priced for audiofiles. I have been looking second hand, but everything I can find is over 40 years old and the cones have all started disintegrating.
- overcast 4y agoYeh, unfortunately you're going to have to spend some bucks for quality. I'm still using my fathers 50 year old ESS Model 5's in my upstairs office and they sound amazing. Original woofers too! I just refoamed them, easy. I love the sound of the HEIL air motion transformers. Downstairs is all Totem I bought 20 years ago.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoI would love some JBL L100 with the 12 inch cones, but I just can't justify the $8K they are here in Australia.
- overcast 4y agoLove the look of those, I'll have to listen to them. $5000 here in the states.
- nl 4y agoI'm in Australia, and there are still plenty of good options around. I got a pair of Dali floorstanders for around AU$1000 a few years back on sale. The Dali Oberon (which I think is the replacement) is $1500 when not on sale right now. You can get B&W 603s for under AU$3000. Sure, you aren't getting a 12" woofer - but these are lovely speakers.
- unfocused 4y agoI have a pair of ($30) Yamaha NS-BP200 and a 48 year old Sony STR-7045 ($50) and an Onko CP1200A (free). They sound really good to me as the amp is really good at driving these speakers, and my Onkyo turntable benefits from excellent phono from the amp. Of course, I can help you drop $50,000 easily on a system and you may still be unsatisfied. I recommend setting a budget and just getting what you can. Also, the used market has amazing stuff. Have a look as well at NAD as they have some very small amps with phono and even subwoofer like D 3020 v2 or D 3045. Those are are very compact. I also have an Onkyo TX-18 from 1990 that still works great.
- alasdair_ 4y agoSonos still has severe limitations and I regret buying two 5.1 setups from them. As a simple example: there is no 7.1 support at all and the Atmos support is a sort of faked 5.1.2 support where the upward firing speakers try to bounce some sounds off the ceiling. Sonos only supports 2.4GHz (no 5GHz support at all) so in a congested area network degradation is a big issue. Codec support is limited as well. For example if your source outputs in DTS, you may need to throw away the whole system and buy a different sonos system just to get audio working. The same thing applies to dolby atmos or vision - you need to buy new speakers just to listen to those type of sources.
- givinguflac 4y agoI just want to point out that while sonosnet is 2.4 only, most of their products support 5ghz APs. In addition, DTS support has been included for a little while now.
- devrand 4y agoFWIW they do support DTS (but not DTS-HD) now.
- christoph 4y agoPoor/late timing, as DTS is essentially dead at this point[1] in the streaming market which I’m guessing is generally what they are catering for. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30942269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30942269
- devrand 4y agoI was actually surprised they bothered to add it at all. It's definitely not for their target audience: people using streaming services. What they provide is actually great for that audience. My best guess is that they keep pushing into the home theater space and wanted to grab a bit of market share from the higher-end bucket without having to pay too much in licensing.
- wctawcta 4y ago
- vgeek 4y agoPretty much this. Places like Parts-express have been creeping more upmarket with their own brands like Dayton Audio to fill some of the gap, but they are still more downmarket hobbyist niche and probably won't ever be in mass market stores. The same thing that happened to cameras being replaced by good enough phones happened to stereos, just with soundbar/box type appliances.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYeah, used to buy a lot of stuff from Parts-Express (mainly full-range drivers) and made some nice speakers, etc.
- Fwirt 4y agoIt 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 range) compressed. So it's a case of (a) people never having been exposed to "hi-fi" and (b) people ceasing to care/being willing to sacrifice audio quality (which is heavily subjective anyway) for convenience. So it is the same as phone cameras, people are willing to sacrifice image quality and control for the convenience of having a camera in their pocket all the time. I personally care about audio to a reasonable degree, but I also think that AVRs in their current form are a weird mix of "too much" and "not enough". I wanted to have a 5.1.2 system that wasn't a soundbar with tiny, tinny speakers that bounce off the ceiling and a tiny sub that moves hardly any air. But in order to drive decent speakers you need a decent amp. But in order to get a decent amp you have to buy a unit that has a million connectors, spatial audio processing, etc. Out of the gigantic array of connectors on the back of my AVR, (7 HDMI ports, phono plugs, component, composite) I am currently using 3 HDMI ports because I play most media off an HTPC anyway. I feel like I'm using less than 30% of what it has to offer, and there is a growing divide between people who want convenience and people who want uncompromising quality at any cost, so low end AVRs aren't much better than a soundbar, and high end AVRs aren't affordable for the average consumer.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI built modern thing a little like the old console stereo units. Used high end full-range drivers for the left/center/right and built in a sub. The thing looks like furniture but has your 3.1 covered. I think there's a Yamaha receiver in there but it isn't too crazy with regards to connectors and such. I like to think the console stereo could come back for people who want higher quality speakers/audio.
- initplus 4y agoStreaming 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.
- m463 4y agoI think soundbars have taken over for home theater setups. annoyingly, you can't get a system without a wireless subwoofer. I have a soundbar that creates a wifi access point for the subwoofer and it's really annoying. I really just want a wire. So, I've been considering an a/v receiver and dedicated speakers, which means I can't mount them on the tv
- bjelkeman-again 4y agoI am using my old Stereo, which has 5.1 support for the DVD and the TV. Way better than must friends soundbar. Maybe there are decent systems, but I doubt you can get as good as proper stereo stuff.
- brokenmachine 4y agoDo it. It'll sound much better than any soundbar.
- kllrnohj 4y agoIf AVRs are DSLRs, then Sonos is Leica, not the iPhone. Sonos is the expensive option that found & cemented a niche audience on an experience. Soundbars are what's killing AVRs for what's left of the 'home theater' market. They're much easier to setup and deliver a good enough experience. For everyone else, it's laptops & tablets with maybe a pair of headphones.
- emkoemko 4y agoyea but AVRs didn't get replaced with better tech like DSLRs did with MLC's
- bitL 4y agoThe main reason why I got a Marantz AVR was to be able to connect 10 different devices to the TV at 4k@60 via HDMI, as well as various sound outputs, including the output of my music studio mixer.
- moralestapia 4y ago>Compact speaker systems like Sonos (that don't need a separate AVR) simply got good enough. I don't like em. I am not the stereotypical smug audiophile but the sound on most of these new systems, soundbars, headphones, etc... is absolute trash. Any pair of moderately-decent bookshelf speakers blows them out of the water and you can get them for ~300USD so they're actually cheaper than "high-end" speakers from brands like Bose, Sonos, etc... which sound terrible IMO.
- brokenmachine 4y agoOld audiophile saying, "there's no replacement for displacement". No amount of whizz-bang tech is going to get around the problem of tiny speakers crammed into a small box in a ridiculous location.
- itisit 4y agoAbout a year ago I tried the top-of-the-line soundbars from LG, Sonos, and Samsung respectively. They all went back to the store. A time-consuming, but worthwhile reminder of the adage you mention.
- jinto36 4y agoSonos 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.
- Nursie 4y agoAs a Sonos owner ... It sounds pretty good to me, and I didn't have to spend time re-foaming anything, or even wiring anything beyond finding power sockets. After I spent five minutes waving my iphone about in each room I have the system in, I don't have to worry about tuning it to the space or anything much else. Plus now with a few taps on my phone I can transport the tv sound into the kitchen and follow along when I'm cooking. Ease of use and lack of time spent messing around with it, is absolutely part of the value proposition. Because this isn't a hobby for me, or something I'm interested in spending time on. I want something fast, easy, convenient, with streams I can shift around the house at will. If the sound is objectively 'middling', well so are my ears most likely. But given just how subjective I know most hifi/audiophile reviews and opinions are, I'm not really worrying about that.
- NoPicklez 4y agoThe difference with Sonos compared to those speakers is that these are wireless and work very well together. They can play music from your TV and also virtually any other music streaming service directly from the app or through the native app itself (e.g. Spotify). However, I'll never forget the big floor standing speakers my parents had and how great I thought they sounded. The difference was they were all wired to a receiver and if you wanted to add any additional speakers outside you needed to hardwire everything.
- hbbio 4y agoAs 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-prime-grow-across-multiple-channels/#:~:text=By%20leveraging%20these%20increased%20service,hitting%20the%20holiday%20peak%20season https://ware2go.co/how-cambridge-audio-leveraged-amazon-prim....