Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Best place to find Denon / Yamaha on line??

MIke, take a close look at ecost and Denon's refurb units there. I've purchased from them twice (and 3 of my friends have also done so) and have been very satisfied.

I believe 12-18 mos ago there was a lengthy discussion here and several positive comments about the ecost experience. It's hard to ignore the pricing, especially when the problems in a unit have already been identified/fixed.

Thanks Ray, I will.

Dammit John, you were right. What do you do, read AV manuals as a hobby? The 2700 applies the same X-over to all speakers set to small. So does that Marantz. I might be stuck with the 4306.

Man, this is a tough call; all three units look to be excellent in their own rights, with their own negative attributes.

Yeah Mike, good that I've been watching the game and just got on. Otherwise I would have had to get back into the manual to give you the exact page(my memory isn't that good!)if you still needed it. As you noticed, the parametric equalization of course applies to each individual speaker, while the bass crossover is just a selection from the several frequencies listed and is applied to all speakers.

Since you're having so much fun reading manuals, note that the Onkyo 804 provides for different bass crossovers for the different speaker groups.

Mike, just another stray thought. I don't know of you have considered HK, but they have their own online refurb store.

Lol, half the stuff in their refurb store probably came from Mike

Mike, I'm not exactly sure of all the criteria you are looking for in a receiver but the specs on the 4306 and 3806 are very similar with the 3806 being about 700.00 cheaper.

Thanks HD.

Two more manuals digested……I’m about sick of reading manuals BTW. I picked a bad time to quit drinking booze. I should have got all this figured out first cuzz I could really use a stiff drink about now. The 3806 is about the same as the 4306. It has multi X-over points for each channel too. That’s good news. I’ve found that the 80’s blend a little better with a lower X-over than the rest of the speakers. I’d really hate to loose that feature. I think I’ve become a complete audio geek…..

The 4306 has USB, Ethernet / PC interface, and I-pod interface of some sort that the 3806 doesn’t. I couldn’t care less about all that crap. My HT is for movies, not ripped music or looking at pictures off a memory stick. The only real drawback is the 3806 only has two HDMI inputs verses the 4306 which has 3 HDMI inputs. I’d prefer three for my three HDMI sources. If my friggin VP-50 worked right I could run all that into it and have one HDMI input into the receiver…..but as my luck with electronics would have it, the VP has intermittent audio drop outs so I need to run everything through the receiver first. Suppose I better figure out if that third port is worth $700. I’m thinking not. I’d rather spend that on a case of Cakebread’s Cab..

John,

User reports that I’ve been reading are not all that great with the Onkyo getting along with HDMI. Multi channel 96/24 PCM from the HD / BR players in particular. There really aren’t that many that do from what I’ve been able to read, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing to say about them. So far about the only AVR’s that seam to be doing well with this are the new Denons and the RX 1700 / 2700. The new Marantz AVR’s do fairly well with the PCM 5.1 96/24 streams, but they will not do any PLIIx or other post 6/7 channel processing. The Denons apparently will and the Yamaha’s will also, but they down mix it to 48/24 before post processing, which pretty much defeats the whole benefit of 96/24 in the first place.

I really have become an audio geek.

For what it's worth, I picked up the 2700 over Christmas in advance of my axioms showing up (which just did) and I've been playing with the HDMI and other functions. At first I couldn't get 1080p passthrough working - only the component connection from my Wii would feed and pass on over HDMI. However after some rearranging of gear, whatever dropout that was happening with my stubby cables (3 foot seemed so much longer when I ordered them!) were being stretched cleared up and now it's working flawlessly. I haven't noticed any degredation in picture quality for what it's worth. While I'd rather have hooked everything up directly to my new Samsung, it wasn't workable with only 2 HDMI inputs on the set and 3 (with more to come ) HDMI sources.

Also, you mentioned the ability to handle PCM audio over HDMI I think. It does do this if I you're asking the question I think you are (and I was before).

I'm sure you already found it, but AVS has a good thread going on the 1700 and 2700: AVS 1700/2700

Finally...I'm sure you can find cheaper places, but I bought my 2700 from ABT electronics out of Chicago. I emailed them wondering if they'd offer a discount since I was looking to buy my Samsung 6188 and the 2700. The request ended up in the hands of corporate sales and the woman I worked with was excellent. Throughout the process she stressed that if I had any problems at all to call her directly and she would get them fixed now. Including soaking up return shipping costs etc.

The fact that I saved $350 from the web listed MSRP on the 2700 and got the 6188 for $150 less than anywhere else reputable I could find on the web felt like a bonus. The overall service alone would have been nearly worth it after some of the horror stories I've read elsewhere.

Wow, long winded. Hope it helps. As you can tell I'm a big fan of the 2700 and I won't begin to tap it's potential till the rest of my axioms show up. If you have questions, let me know. The impact will probably seem less for you since you apparently had "nice" gear before.

Good luck.

Nick