General advice on AV Receivers

[Pashers]

Hey all,

Looking into buying surround sound (KEF KHT2005.3 K1 is what I'm looking into at the moment). Any recommendations for an AV receiver? Any advice what to look out for?

Thanks

[Oaktech]

Everyone has an opinion on their favourite brand, but personally wouldn't touch kef with a bargepole. I used to do a lot of AV repair work and kef were always singularly unhelpful and expensive to buy parts from. I also saw a lot more of it on the bench than i should have done given they are not that big sales wise. personally i would look at offerings from yamaha and denon first.

[Pashers]

Thanks, I'll look into those two. It's for a small area - I know very little about sound but I do know that Bose seems to have bad reputation.

[Dos_Box]

Onkyo are always very well received. Richer Sounds have a selection of them and I see the TXSR608 is on offer (it does THX!!) for £299.95 ATM as well

AV Receivers | Home Cinema Separates | Richer Sounds

[Oaktech]

the problem with bose is that it is very expensive, and essentially relies on trickery to reproduce what your ears think they are hearing.

generally speaking physics dictates that if you want to make a powerful low sound you need to move a lot of air, and that is why people have 12plus inch subs...

for bose, physics is an inconvenience that interferes with their desire to package things is small cheap boxes, so they use heavilly processed equalization, harmonics and sub harmonics to trick your ears.

if you run bose loudspeakers without the bose processing they sound tinny and flat, as you might expect small relatively cheap speakers to do. its clever stuff, but as an audophile/person who made a living out of 'listening carefully' it's not very honest.

Onkyo doesn't have the best reputation, but i've installed it and it works well enough, and often has a 2year warranty. it shares a lot of features/designs/parts with more expensive systems such as technics. but it is essentially distributed as a disposable product.

[john]

if you run bose loudspeakers without the bose processing they sound tinny and flat, as you might expect small relatively cheap speakers to do. its clever stuff, but as an audophile/person who made a living out of 'listening carefully' it's not very honest.

Fully agree with that about Bose, our place has a pair of Bose PA speakers, people go ooh Bose quality audio etc... eer they would be but they are slightly damaged and there is no Sound Processor for them so they are flat and tinny sounding They sounded better before kids were messing so I suspect they have hurt them We have now changed them out for a fully fitted system in both Drama and Hall so they are in the portable / spares cupboard now Still without a DSP though.

On with AV Receivers, I have a Yamaha one and its been great really nice sound quality with my Eltax speakers Well worth a look at them, this has USB sockets which is great for playing files from my HDDs