Overdose said:
altruistic.lemon said:
Shame about the sound quality, though! AV amps are great with film, but, oh my, do they die with music. All the bling in the world doesn't make up for sound quality.
What is it about AV amps that make them good for movie soundtracks but not music?
Movie soundtracks are generally more dynamically demanding than music.
The ultimate capabilities of AV receivers vary greatly, just like everything else. Sme are great at what they do. Some, not so.
The power ratings on AV receivers are usually measure 'one channel driven', or two channels at best. You rarely see a rating for all five or seven channels driven because the rating would appear much lower. Stick to a speaker package it can handle and it'll sound fine, but people insist on partnering speaker packages that the receiver just can't drive properly, and end up with a sound that isn't representative of the price paid.
Component quality isn't necessarily up with a dedicated hi-fi amplifier. Yes, there will be a lot of standard parts they'll share, but components like the transformer itself, as one example, is usually an 'off the shelf' frame type, whereas many decent hi-fi amps will have a toroidal or bespoke toroidal transformer. These transformers only have to drive two speakers, so are generally more stable, especially with 4ohm loads, with which many receivers can get quite hot under the collar, or even cut out altogether.
Because an equivalently priced AV receiver has to perform many other tasks (picture switching, picture upscaling, picture up-conversion, digital to analogue conversion, analogue to digital conversion, room EQ processing, multiple zone switching, audio streaming, internet radio, various sound format decoding, and also include an integral analogue radio etc etc), you generally find that less of the budget has been spent where it matters. It makes them great value, but their basic sound quality doesn't necessarily reflect the price.
I've done many demos over the years (two channel demos) with various AV receivers, with widely varying results. Some AV receivers have sounded like an 80's Amstrad midi in comparison (before anyone asks - yes, I have heard one, a friend owned one).
One thing shouldn't be overlooked. When AV suddenly boomed in the mid 90's, a lot of people were quick to dump their hi-fi systems for a system that could do everything - hi-fi and surround sound. Since then, the AV side of things has improved greatly, and very regularly too, and we came to a point about 4-5 years ago where people started to become a little disillusioned with the AV market because of the yearly product updates, whether there were any real advances or not. People were getting sick of being left with an 'out of date' product a year after they bought it, along with a high level of depreciation. They've been coming back to hi-fi systems to save space, improve simplicity, along with many other reasons. One of those reasons is that they remember how good their hi-fi system used to sound for music, an area that their current AV system is lacking.
In contrast, hi-fi hasn't really changed that much over the decades. Yes, we now have high efficiency amplification, music streaming, digital room EQ etc, but only music streaming has had any real impact on the market. So a system that is 15 years old is still a valid system, isn't out of date, and a streamer can be added to it - they don't have to replace their entire system.
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