My Sunfire receiver arrived Monday afternoon. I didn't get it in place until late, so I haven't had it to really high levels yet, but I did get a chance to breeze through select parts of a few DVDs. Since it was late, I don't have a lot of comments on the amplifier yet, except that I'm certain there's much more headroom than what was available from the Yamaha it replaced. I'm very happy with how little heat it generates, and the face and case are nice. I like the huge blue display, the lettering can easily be read from 15 feet away (a problem with the Yamaha was that the display was almost illegible from the listening position). I'm not thrilled with all the orange lighted buttons that are on all of the time, but I'll give it a few days looks-wise; it might just be the stark contrast to the Yasmaha it replaced. The remote is a URC MX-500, with which I'm familiar and enjoy for its simplicity, speed, hard buttons, and effective (and easy to engage) backlighting.
It's driving M80 mains, VP150 center, and Polk RT600i surrounds. There's a trio of QS-8's ready to replace the RT600i's, but I haven't had time to wire them yet. Sunfire True Subwoofer Signature, with the receiver crossover (global) at 60Hz for the moment and all speakers set to large.
One thing I noticed is that the subwoofer output is much lower than it was from the Yamaha. This is a good thing; the Yamaha output was so hot that I had to crank it down and run the subwoofer gain at near nil, which made it touchy to adjust.
I have read a complaint or two about noise levels, but I've had no audible noise problems. However, I haven't listened to plain old CD yet.
Ay any rate, with the Axioms, I've now got the headroom I needed in this room (and it looks like plenty to spare) for movies. The DSP also seems to be better than the Yamaha it replaced, at least in terms of DD and DTS. The Yamaha had more useful miscellaneous soundfields (Cinema DSP is good as far as these things go), but I never used them for audio and only rarely for stereo TV enhancement. I don't think I'll miss them.
Kudos to Sunfire for packing a wallop in a box that only weighs 35 lbs. and doesn't heat my family room. It looks miniscule compared to the Denon AVR5803, and combined with the MX-500 remote the WAF is very high. Kudos to them making their RS-232 control codes public too; I'm almost done with rudimentary control software.
