In the months of October and November I made more money selling the crap in our closets at home than I did working for Dell on my salary/wage. What does that mean? I sold a TON of high margin stuff. I just sold a DBX 4BX sound expander the other day for $225, and it only cost me $5 at Goodwill about 8 months ago. Most of my sales were like that. I was sitting on a gold mine and finally cashed it in.
So anyways, back to the topic at hand, something THX certified. In our home we have 3 systems you can watch movies on, one in the bedroom with my 46" LED, one in the middle living room with the 37" LCD, and one in the big living room with the 100" drop down high definition projector. Well my goal had been to upgrade all the systems eventually to HDMI with high definition codec decoding (DTS MasterHD, Dolby TrueHD, etc). So far I only had a mid-line Harman Kardon AVR254 7.1 HDMI receiver in the big living room. It's pretty damn good actually, but I've always wanted more. Don't forget my 10 year old Sony 555ES receiver that I sold for $200 as well, that's what started all this.
So, step 1 - make some money to buy a nice receiver. Well how do we make money, my thrifty pickers? Buy low and sell high. I perused the Best Buy auction site as usual, and craigslist, and Goodwill. In the end I bought two receivers for the time being, a Pioneer 820-K and 1019AH-K. Both were HDMI receivers, supporting 1080p and high def codecs. The 1019AH-K was last years model, 7.1 channel top of the line. It's identical to last years Pioneer Elite, sans the pre-outs and cool amber display. The 820-K is this years 5.1 HDMI 3D capable. Basically I paid about 100 for each one, as is coming only with the receiver. I used them in my bedroom and middle living room for a while.
Well the performance of them was unimpressive, so I sold them both. The 1019 sold for $225, and the 820k sold for $150. Not bad, I ended up with $375 made from $200. I also sold the Velodyne sub I bought at Goodwill, $200 on a $30 investment. So I decided to spend about $400 on a receiver, because Christmas is here and I didn't want to unload all my money on a receiver. I figured I'd get a mid line receiver, that was higher end than what I got from the Best Buy site. I looked around at Yamaha, Denon, Sony, and Onkyo. In the end I settled on the Onkyo TX-NR807 7.2 (9.2 with additional amps) Network receiver. It's last years $1100 HDMI receiver. The only thing it doesn't have is 3D capability. I could care less about that feature.
Well I ordered it refurbished from accessories4less.com and it arrived in 3 days. Cost? $429. I got the box with all the accessories and manual, and opened it up. It's in brand new shape. Not a single scratch on it. I seriously don't think this thing was ever used. It probably left the factory, was delivered and opened, and then returned. Well it saved me over $600 so I'm not complaining.
I was actually lazy this weekend, normally with a new toy of this magnitude I would have stopped any and everything I was doing to go hook it up. It wasn't until Sunday night that I decided to hook it up. I yanked all the wires out the back of my trusty HK AVR254 and put it to the side. Lately I've been on a kick of trying to clean up wires. I'm tired of having to twist speaker wires and stick them in the terminals, and screw it down. I bought a ton of Nakamichi banana plugs and I screwed them on the ends to make setup easier.
Anyways, the actual hookup of the receiver took about 30 seconds. 3 HDMI in (Bluray, Cable, HD-DVD) and 1 out (LCD/Projector) along with the power cord. That's it. Oh and the speaker wires.
The other ten minutes came from plugging all the power cords back in and routing them through the stand. The problem with my Z-Line glass stand is you can see ALL the wires behind it. Any one know a way to hide grand-central station of wires?
Anyways I powered it up and tried to play a movie. Conveniently, Avatar was already loaded in the bluray player so I just let it play. I fast forwarded to the scene where they blow the hell out of home tree and let it rip. Holy crap this receiver has power, but where was the bass? The front panel showed the sub was on, and so did the onscreen display. I played with it for five minutes wondering why my trusty Polk PSW150 sub wasn't firing off. Stupid me, I forgot to plug the sub cable into the receiver. Once I did the bass was back, but it was kind of disappointing. Nothing was shaking, the bass was barely felt. I decided to run the Audessey auto calibration at this point to maybe get some better sound.
The Audessey process is pretty cool, you get this odd shaped mic with a tripod mount that you put in your listening position(s) and run the setup. It sends out pings from all the channels first to see what speakers are actually hooked up. It correctly identified my setup as 5.1 instead of 7.1 or 9.1. I don't see any point in 7.1 anyways. After that it asks you to put the mic in your listening position 1 and runs some random noise through each speaker. I put the mic on a surveyors tripod and let it rip. The process measures the frequency response and time delay between all the speakers, so that it knows how big each speaker is, and how far it is from the user. It got each speaker down to the inch. The only problem is it set my center channel to 40hz and mains to 60hz. This means my front stage can put out a lot of bass by themselves, but it was odd the smaller center was measured as larger than the sides. Oh well, I reset them all to 80hz since this is a THX receiver and that is the normal THX setting. After it ran the tests, it took about 5 minutes to run its calculations and save the config.
I unpaused Avatar after this and it was amazing. The sound from the speakers was calibrated now and it was just like IMAX. But the bass was still missing. It was there but subdued. I hit some buttons on the remote and saw that the LFE/Sub was set at -15. Why did it set it so low? It must have thought my sub was way too loud. I set it to -5 and the house started to shudder like a tornado was approaching. Audio nirvana hit. 135 watts per channel, and near-reference levels of THX sound made it amazing.
The receiver gave my speakers a new lease on life. Not that the HK was bad, but the Onkyo has much more power (135w vs 50w). The HK will be fine in the bedroom. My Klipsch system sang to heights it had never seen before. The bass was tight, the treble was refined. I watched about 20 minutes of the movie and decided this one is a keeper, unless someone offers me more on Craigslist, hehe.
I hooked up the router to the receiver and let it do a firmware update. That took about 30 minutes, but at least it was automated. The HK unit took like four hours because you have to use a serial port and it has to do a bunch of random crap. After that I fired up the NET mode of the receiver, and it connected to Pandora. Logging in was a pain in the ass, as the remote has no keyboard and the onscreen keyboard was so slow. Thankfully you only have to do this once. I put Usher on and it sounded pretty good for internet compressed music. I need to get an SACD player some time and see how it sounds.
Highly recommended, especially for this price.
