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With AV receivers is sound quality more important than features?

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about AV receiver feature glut. Today's receiver manufacturers put an inordinate amount of time and money into designing feature-laden receivers, and feature glut might be part of the reason why today's receivers don't sound as good as receivers did in the 1980s. I get it, today's consumers rarely compare one receiver's sound with another receiver, but they can count HDMI connections, so that's where the money goes.

It's not that Denon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony, and Yamaha aren't trying to make great-sounding receivers, … Read more

Shattering audiophile stereotypes

Audiophile gear is always really expensive.

Not true. While there's no shortage of stupid expensive audio toys, there's lots of affordable stuff too, such as Rotel's beautifully built RA 1062 integrated amplifier ($699).

Audiophiles rarely embrace new technology.

Guilty, with an explanation. Audiophiles don't jump on every new tech gizmo that comes down the pike, so we steered clear of iPods for the longest time. But now that we can get uncompressed digital directly out of the little buggers with devices like Wadia's 170iTransport, audiophiles are getting with the program. We were just waiting for … Read more