Onkyo is bankrupt

How’s so? You can still buy and AVR and various types of speakers.

A large part (for me) is the WAF, which is valid for me. The benefits of a custom-built entertainment center outweigh the advantages of separate speakers. Those benefits include hidden wiring, TV integration, attractiveness, and the aforementioned WAF. My setup is shown in the “Showing Off Your Roon Setup” thread, Feb 4th, 2022

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WAF is real , as we prepared to sell the house and downsize after I retired it became obvious that to make the house more saleable the speakers (5 + Sub) were an eyesore.(Look at Garden & Home etc and find the show home with speakers or Hi Fi at all)

Add to that the neighbours are quite close so mega volume music isn’t really on . The solution was an ace pair of headphones (Sennheiser HD800) and a comfy chair as my retirement present

Everyone expects a Big Screen TV and a soundbar is not out of place . So I went to the (then) top of Samsung range soundbar (HW-K950) which includes 2 tiny surrounds and a sub (all wireless except for power so no long draping wires) and Atmos. It sounds extremely good on video , maybe not quite so good on audio.

I now “negotiate” towards better headphone amps . I still get HiFi with phones and general background with the soundbar plus assorted BT speakers

Overall I am happy , the HD800 take a lot of beating , I have just been through that exercise.

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I have to say my wife has always been extremely tolerant of my designing the living room around the AV system and then allowing me to add a separate 2 channel listening system as well. I count myself as being extremely lucky :grin:

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Same here although she has had her wobbles, bass traps where a no no and i have had to place speakers so she can open the windows without knocking them off with her hips, I don’t suffer the same problem :). So they are not at the optimal position but needs must.

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I have to say Mrs.Hammer has been most forgiving of multiple speakers, amps, wiring etc…as long as her AV experience looked and sounded good.
I am blessed!

However she did give big nods of approval when I scrapped the 7.1 system and went to 2.1 so was able to ditch 99% of the wiring around the room and speakers in back walls.
The real note of success was when she said she thought it sounded just as good if not better.
I spent the money from sales of surround speakers and amps on a better integrated amp and Totem floorstanding speakers which are very understated in appearance but huge in SQ.
All happy here.

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Same here, got to move all the furniture to one side in a way that was helpful, but she has seen the room treatment in many YouTube videos and her response was to buy another bookshelf :wink: (no argument from me there either)

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Mrs Pixelpopper insists on having her own system…

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But is it Roon Ready? :joy:

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It’s got FM & Dab, apparently. I don’t know much about it other than where the off switch is :rofl:

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The horror.

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I’m always struck when the same three things cascade through my consciousness when I play music through our TV system.

  1. How satisfying our 5.1 TV system is for movies and other video. It has a decent Yamaha AVR, KEF Q100 and Q300 speakers, and a sealed sub.

  2. How it falls flat playing music (from roon, of course) directly through airplay or through an nvidia shield endpoint. Almost decent, but…

  3. How life-like music is on our truly fabulous high fidelity stereo system.

I can tweak the AVR and play games with music-only playback, such as using the “7.1 stereo” mode with its fun but false envelopment, or one of it’s derived surround modes, or run it in pure passthru mode, and though acceptable when not compared to something else, it’s light-years away from what two channel stereo is capable of.

Sound bars and powered monitors/speakers can’t touch high fidelity stereo. Top of the line AVRs like Onkyo made can come close to it. DSP can fix issues that can’t be solved other than with better quality components in the speakers or serious work on acoustics that usually isn’t welcome in the home. In my experience, DSP room or speaker correction always imposes a sonic penalty that fortunately isn’t audible in most circumstances, so it can be a net plus when the “high” is missing from fidelity.

Sadly, most people don’t know the potentially sublime experiences they forfeit when buying into lifestyle products and convenience products that are displacing previous audio technologies.

- Eric

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I have a Meridian 861. I see myself dying before it’s replaced. Of course, I’m already pretty old, so it’s not much of a prediction. I will be in the market for an 8K Video (disc?) player if it ever comes along.

I’ve got the little brother of your soundbar: HW850. I think it’s great for TV/movies and passable for music. Oddly, even though it’s got Atmos processing, it won’t play Tidal’s Atmos music. Go figure.