Onkyo reviews?

[admin_exported]

WHAT HI FI S&V,

Are there any plans to review the Onkyo A9377 amp, A5VL amp or their new SACD player, CS5VL ?

Thanks 🙂

 

[the record spot]

Ah, at last, someone else interested in the last two!

 

[Anonymous]

They look nice and review would be useful. Little bit worries about A5VL techical specs:

Total Harmonic Distortion - 0.08% (1kHz, 8ohm, 1 W Output) and Damping Factor - 60 (1kHz, 8ohm)

 

[Simon Lucas]

The A5VL gets a First Test in the November issue (o/s 16th September). The CD player's been delayed 'for a bit'.

 

[the record spot]

OK, so a 3 star review for the A-5VL amplifier yet it seems to tick many boxes on several accounts. Could one man's "sterile" be seen as another's "transparent"?

No mention of the dual-mono power sections in the design, or the onboard 24bit/192khz DAC though, which is a bit of a major omission when it comes to features, especially those not commonly found at this price?

One last thing, what does "...this results in a slight lack of organic degradation to the sparse guitar..." mean please?!

Oh, this just in from Pedant's Corner: the Kandy K2 review, that would be Roksan aiming to eke out a higher performance from its' products I assume you mean...?

 

[Andrew Everard]

the record spot:No mention of the dual-mono power sections in the design, or the onboard 24bit/192khz DAC though

Well, no, but then the majority of power amplifier sections in integrated amplifiers are dual-mono, and about half the copy was about the amplifier's digital capabilities...

the record spot:
Oh, this just in from Pedant's Corner: the Kandy K2 review, that would be Roksan aiming to eke out a higher performance from its' products I assume you mean...?

No, the Roksan designers really had to scare the amplifier into delivering that last bit of performance.

 

[the record spot]

Dual mono: ah, right - well...I never claimed to be a techy wiz (reaches for coat).

Roksan: And they still only got four stars....come on Roksan-bods, new tactic needed!

 

[Andrew Everard]

Well, there's dual-mono and dual-mono: you could have a design in which the two channels are kept apart right back to the transformer, or indeed transformers if you want to go the whole hog and make only the mains input common between them.

But the fact remains that stereo amplifiers use mono output devices and drivers for each channel, so in that respect they are are all to some a greater or lesser extent dual-mono.

Just as there's dual-mono and there's dual-mono, so there's marketing and marketing...

 

[the record spot]

Granted, and it'll have been Onkyo's marketing blurb on their site that highlighted this feature. I thought it was bringing something a little different to the table, but I now know better!

(Thanks for the background by the way, useful to know - the nearest I get to that side of things is turning the amp on...!)