I remember Julian Hirsch, the head tester for Stereo Review, giving less than stellar reveiws of amps and receivers that didn't make their specified output.

I just went to Sound and Vision online, and apparently it is now perfectly OK to come up short. I read glowing reviews of a new Denon, an Onkyo and a few others. Amazing how they are rated at, for example, 140X7, but then in parenthesis farther down it says (two channels driven). In fact, I believe it was an Onkyo with a rave review. The sentence was along the lines of "with one channel driven, it easily beat its specified power, and it came close to its rating, even with 5 channels driven." Of cours, all 7 channels was a bit less output yet.

This is a load of crap. Amplifiers and receivers should be rated as watts per all channels driven into 8/4 ohms from 20-20k at .01% distortion. They should need to meet their ratings.

Heck, one of the reviews showed that a 90X7 receiver put out 85x5 and 80X7, but then their was an asterisk behind the results. When I looked at the asterisk on the bottom of the test results, it said that this power was sustained for several MILLISECONDS before thermal protection reduced power output to 1/3 of that. Is that somehow real world? This tells me that if I bought this 90X7 reciever, I could expect protection to limit it to about 27X7. Come on...that is 6db of headroom lost!

I am not trying to be a butthead, but this is wrong. Don't play games. List power as watts per channel continuous (not short transient bursts), all channels driven into 8 and 4 ohms (dual ratings) from 20-20kHz (full spectrum white noise, not a simple 1kHz sine wave) at .01% THD (to keep all the players honest!).

Apples to apples!

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