Mr. UPS man showed up with my spiffy new Onkyo TX-SR876.
Man, what a beast. Hooked it all up and ran the Audyssey calibration. Then my wife and I poured a couple glasses of wine and sat down to do a little bit of listening.
The good: This is much more what I had in mind for a 'modern' receiver. All the setup is on the GUI, with volume and DSP mode onscreen. Easy to configure and looks good. It doesn't seem to have any trouble driving M80's. The Audyssey setup went well enough. I can hear what it's doing but I'm still not really blown away by it. Ummmm.... That's about it.....
The bad: Ok, well, I guess my LPA+43TX combo and the SC-05 have me spoiled, or I'm just completely used to the way Pioneer gear sounds, because we are totally unimpressed by the 876's amp section. Listening to a half dozen of our 'gold-standard' songs revealed a grating harshness to the sound that just was not pleasant. My wife describes it as muddy. Highs were just screechy and lacked any sparkle. Much less 'texture' to the music than I'm used to. It's especially noticeable with stringed instruments. Everyone knows that a real violin, played well, almost has a 'taste' to it. Rich & velvety, the instrument alive in the musicians hands. There's very little of that with the Onkyo. Even in the 'Audio Pure Direct' mode, multi-channel inputs with ZERO processing, the sound is *very* different than the 43TX+LPA or SC-05. I know there's a strong current of 'amps don't matter' here, but by god, this just sounds different, even using the direct multichannel inputs.
We were starting to feel quite audio-fatigued after about 30 minutes. Compare that to our listening of the SC-05 that went on for hours. But enough of that...
I see the point that everyone has been trying to make about upscalers. Seems to be *totally* overrated (or maybe just unnecessary for my sources). My sources for this test included my Dish Vip722 HD receiver, looking at both HD and SD feeds. Both are scaled by the Vip722 into 1080i, with no 'native' option. Then I played around with an OTA HD network broadcast. Then I ran some tests with my Denon 480p DVD/SACD player. The HD sources looked *worse* when passed through the upscaler. On the OTA HD broadcast in particular, it gave a very grainy appearance to anything white. It did just slightly improve the PQ on the SD feeds, but I'm talking slight. Certainly not enough of an improvement to really mean anything. SD TV sucked before and it still sucks after.
I couldn't tell a difference on the 480P DVD, other than the TV reporting a 1080P signal rather than 480P. This is all on a 61" Samsung LED DLP 1080P set that's about 9 months old.
And here's an interesting nugget... when listening to SACD's, my SACD/DVD player has a status screen that displays a big old 'DENON' logo on a purple background. While playing a SACD, I could actually see a faint, weird interference in the purple background that changed depending on the transient volume of the music playing. It would oscillate quickly when the music was soft, and then stop and almost reverse directions when the music got loud again. Imagine looking through a fan in front of a TV- that effect. Bizarre!!
So in case you haven't figured it out by now, the Onkyo is being returned. ASAP. I've got the SC-05 hooked back up and the difference in SQ is stunningly clear. Bass is crisp and powerful, the midrange is lovely and pleasant, and the highs are crisp and clean again, without a hint of excessive sibilance/screechyness. Same sources, same room, same cables, same songs.
Sorry Onkyo, I do not love thee.
I may be picking up a Denon 3808 this weekend, as I it is such a highly respected AVR. Though now that I think I see that I don't need/want to do any scaling with my sources, I'm more inclined to want to keep the SC-05, as it's audio is sublime.
And I could sell the LPA-1 to finance Oppo's BR player...
