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Have I ever told you my Onkyo story ?

Let me tell it again.....

My company moved me and my sales rep to Colorado in 1995 and we worked in Boulder overlooking Pearl St. and Broadway [the Pearl St Mall]. Fantastic office spaces up on the 2nd floor with big windows. I picked the offices out myself. Rent wasn't cheap and I recall ordering a dedicated T1 line from AT&T. $1000/mo for internet access!

I wanted to outfit my office with a stereo system a cut above mass market consumer junk. As luck would have it there was an audio store only a 10 minute walk at the other end of Pearl St. Yes, a real brick and mortar audio store!

Long story short, I bought a low profile $400 NAD receiver. $400 was a decent amount of money back in 1995. I don't recall the model but I figured the NAD receiver would make a great "mid-fi" foundation for my office stereo system. NOT !!

What a piece of NAD crap. It sounded anemic and compressed. The old style LCD display with incandescent light bulb side-lighting was nearly impossible to see from across the room and operating it was not at all intuitive. That wasn't so bad once set up but the music spewing from this NAD was pathetic sounding. It was 'warm' sounding because the highs and lows were so rolled off but worse of all, it was very compressed sounding.

Fast forward a couple months of listening to the intolerable NAD and I pickup a hefty and beautiful looking Onkyo receiver at a department store. It was HALF the PRICE of the NAD. The Onkyo had a large blue vacuum florescent digital display, several memory presets, easy to see from across the room, it was easy to operate including the remote.

But best of all... the Onkyo sounds FANTASTIC !!

Lesson learned : Don't expect audiophile brands to necessarily sound better than mass market stuff from the department store. I had a similar experience with a lower-end model Marantz integrated ($900 range) for the family room TV setup. Ended up buying a low-end $200 Sony AV receiver from Amazon that sounds better.




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