![]() Of course, the EQ will apply only to the tape deck, not the other components connected to the receiver. Are there any equalizers that do not need tape monitoring?Īctually, you don't need a receiver with a tape-monitor functionall you need to do is connect the output of your tape deck to the input of the equalizer and the output of the equalizer to an input on the receiver. To do so, however, I didn't know that the receiver needs a "tape monitor" capability, which most modern receivers don't have. I'll write a how to buy vintage receivers blog post in a few weeks.I've had a very old equalizer for about 25 years, and I would love to use it for listening to my tapes. So if you care more about sound quality than features, look around for a great old receiver! Go ahead and hook up your Blu-ray player's HDMI output directly to your display and get state-of-the-art image quality, and the player's stereo analog outputs to the receiver, and you may get better sound than today's receivers. He tested the Pioneer and confirmed the specifications: "It delivered 273.3 watts into 8 ohms and 338.0 watts into 4 ohms." It's a stereo receiver, but it totally blew away Denon's state-of-the-art flagship model in terms of power delivery! ![]() Denon's brand-new $5,500 AVR-5308CI delivers 150 watts per channel! The 31-year-old Pioneer SX-1980 receiver Butterworth wrote about was rated at 270 watts per channel. ![]() For example, Pioneer's least expensive receiver, the VSX-521 ($250) is rated at 80 watts a channel its VSX-1021 ($550) only gets you to 90 watts: and by the time you reach the VSX-53 ($1,100) you're only up to 110 watts per channel! Doubling the budget to $2,200 gets you 140 watts per channel from their SC-37 receiver. In those days the least expensive models had 20 or 30 watts a channel, but now most low- to midprice receivers have around 100 watts per channel. Right up through most of the 1990s power ratings differentiated models within a given manufacturer's lineup, but that's barely true anymore. Butterworth said, "Even with all the levels carefully matched, and even in conditions where none of the receivers were ever pushed past their limits, the Pioneer SX-1980 simply beat the hell out of the other receivers." Gee, what a shock in three decades, the industry has gone backward! In blind tests, where the listeners did not know which receiver was playing, most preferred the sound of the ancient Pioneer. Industry insiders refer to the practice of cramming as many features as possible into the box as "checklist design." Sure, there are rare glimpses of original thinking going on-Pioneer's proprietary MCACC (Multi Channel Acoustic Calibration) auto-setup system is excellent-it's just that there's precious little unique technology in most receivers.Īs luck would have it, my friend Brent Butterworth just wrote an article where he compared the sound of a 2009 Yamaha RX-V1800 receiver with a 1980 Pioneer SX-1980 and a 1978 Sony STR-V6 receiver. ![]() That's no longer true the majority of today's gotta-have features-auto-setup, GUI menus, AirPlay, iPod/iPhone/iPad compatibility, home networking, HD Radio, Bluetooth, HDMI switching, digital-to-analog converters, Dolby and DTS surround processors-are sourced and manufactured by other companies. Right up through the 1980s most of what was "under the hood" was designed and built by the company selling the receiver. I'm not claiming today's receivers sound "bad," but since almost no one ever listens to a receiver before they buy one, selling sound quality is next to impossible.īack in the days when brick-and-mortar stores ruled the retail market, audio companies took pride in their engineering skills and designed entire receivers in-house. It's a strange turn of events, but mainstream manufacturers long ago gave up on the idea of selling receivers on the basis of superior sound quality. ![]()
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