Comment by christoph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christoph | Hacker News Reader

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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. Their hardware from my experience was utter garbage. It had great features and UI, but literally went up in a puff of smoke on an annual basis. After three or four cycles I got fed up and changed to Yamaha. Unplugging a load of HDMI cables, speaker cables, re-running audio calibration, etc. is not something you enjoy repeating on an annual basis. I was always glad Richer Sounds (in the UK) have an unbelievably good returns policy. Even loaning me another amp FOC for a couple of months while Onkyo tried to repair one of them for me, before they gave up and just sent me a whole new higher end amp, free of charge.

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.

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 - time just flies ...

Isn’t it lovely when you realise you have electronics that have lasted nearly three decades and are still useful?

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…

This. Now that smart plugs are common, adding fans is something anyone can do effectively.

"Isn’t it lovely when you realise you have electronics that have lasted nearly three decades and are still useful?

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.

> 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)).

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

"v belt cassette recorder" Duckduckgo gave me a gem: cassettedrivebelts.com

> try cleaning the heads with IPA

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.

I remember those days people used to say if it's Japanese at least you don't need to worry about quality. There was also this "quality movement" in Japan.

I bought an Onkyo 5.1 receiver at a garage sale yesterday for $5. This house I moved into has prewired surround speakers and I felt like I should take advantage.

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.

Honestly.. just drop 400 to 500 bucks on a recent Marantz or Denon amp, your experience will be infinitely better. Five bucks might have been extortion and/or theft. Also, a decent sub (or two ;)) and spending time tuning it to your room, makes maybe more difference than anything else.

Unless you then try to hook that Denon up via HDMI to an LG TV - eARC won't work.

Why not? Regular ARC works fine on my Denon/LG setup. Is eARC lacking support because of a driver issue they could fix, or some kind of licensing issue?

Unfortunately a modern receiver is worth the money.

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.

This matches my experience, too. Setting up eARC and especially getting PS5 to use all speakers while being connected only to the TV took quite a bit of time, though.

Why wouldn't you connect the PS5 to the receiver?

Because then I lose 120Hz, which my TV supports, but the receiver doesn't.

> 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.

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.

My Yamaha 2.0 amplifier is “buggy” in that it sometimes fails to turn on, so I have to pull it’s power cable and plug it back in to get it to turn on again.

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.

I bought a Yamaha amp in 2000, still works perfectly.

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.

Man that's fascinating: I just found a digital amplifier board that does 50W-50W 2.0 channel output with coaxial digital input, perfect for what I'm after, for like $70 lol.

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

Commenting as I didn't know about this option for stereo amplification until a couple of years ago: I'm using Alientek D8, a "full digital" amplifier. It's great -- tiny, affordable, superb sound quality. Digital inputs are optical, coaxial, and USB (works as an external sound card).

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.

Not 100% certain but seems you are looking for smaller a 2 channel amplifier. This one from Emotiva may be what you are looking for.

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 had an Onkyo receiver that suddenly stopped working. I always attributed it to a nearby lightning strike frying it (and only it), but now your comment makes me wonder if it was just straight up defective.

I had two very old receivers that lasted a number of years each. When the last one wouldn't stay on, I tried to then buy another Onkyo receiver. Somehow late last year but there was some insane shortage everywhere, and Best Buy was literally out of everything. Online also proved to be difficult.

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.

This. We had some Onkyo speakers and an amplifier.

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.

I'm still rocking my 20yr old Onkyo amp. Maybe they're out of business because lots of people are still using their old equipment happily? Anecdotes, huh.

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