July 29th, 2009 by 
adam
What receiver would you throw down a black hole, never to be seen, and more importantly heard from again?
You ever had a receiver that just never sounded right, or blew up, melted away soon after purchasing? Wish you have never heard it, wish you had never seen it, wish it had never existed, wish you could throw in a black hole never to be heard from again? I have. A nice cheap-o Sony 7.1 surround sound receiver. About 6 months after I got it for the computer (we watch movies on the computer at home) something happened and the sub basically went full power all the time. Well, that ended that.
But what about you? Best story of a receiver hell you wish you could catapult into a black hole never to be heard again WINS an audioREVIEW T-Shirt.
Leave your story below in the comments. We’ll pick a winner next weekend.
July 30th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I had a Onkyo TX-SR506 DEMO , took it back to the store because it sounded bad, looked cheap and
the buttons felt cheap. Replaced it with a Yamaha rx-v463 which sounds warmer and looks and feels
better . The Onkyo also ran hot which worried me.
Thanks
Bob
August 1st, 2009 at 3:54 pm
After having Maratanz tube, Sherwoods, it was time to update power for a larger living room . I was looking for the cleanest power I could fnd for stereo ( LPs, CDs, tape) and also had AV connectivity for my HiFi Mitsubushi belt drive VCR (remember those) and cable TV, it was 1995 or so. I found this SONY STRG8 AV reciever that had plenty of power and decent sound, it was on sale $200 less than the common retail of $ 800 at Frys’s electronics in Sunnyvale. so I bought it. This was during the hey dey of Silicon Valley and so just fitting, the SONY had a GUI type remtore that was one fo the first OSD-On Screen Displays and the remote was an Egg shaped wireless unit with one click button and you moved the whole egg to move the cursor across the screen (mmm theortically that is). All soundded great on paper, well the distortion at higher volume was not good as what I had in the past, but worse was that you needed the TV on to tune, control settings and volume, there was NO manual methods to control the SONY receiver even on the receiver front panel and no optional remote with any buttons! And the remote was weak, inaccurate, had limited range of like 4 feet, making you stand there like a dork most of the time waving your hand around to get the cursor exactly on the right setting bar, ARRGH! what a PoS = one of SONY’s worst designs EVER, that only the msot tech savvy techno nerd 40 year old virign could love but took far too much effort and time to work for those of us less enamroed with Bill Gates and more a fan of the IPod. I don’t even think I could sell this on Ebay!! And unlike Sony camcorders the damn thing lasted too long so I could not get the wife to agree to replace it with something better until while away on business she had a party and was completely unable to do basics like adjust the sound, = pure frustation, it’s a great motivator! Now I’m the proud owner of a Onkyo 607, the nightmare is over!!!! The curse of the SONY is cured!