Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Pioneer Elite VSX-74TXVi

...and what is IN the punch, exactly?

Polkie, the 74TXV isn't "just 8 ohm" regardless of the specs in the manual. It's got very powerful amplification at 4 ohms which should almost certainly be plenty for a speaker such as the M80 in your size room.

Good morning!

I have the '74TXVi with the M60's and it sounds very very good. As you can see from my sig, I have the 60's with M3's in the back, VP100, QS4's and an EP350. All sound excellent.

But if I had to do it all over again, I'm not sure I would go with the Pioneer. I have run into a couple of odd quirks and have gotten absolutely NO help from Pioneer in resolving them:

* Selecting HDMI as an input source means Audio HAS to come in that way too. That means you can't switch video with this receiver on a device with DVI output and use a different audio source (like Coax or Optical).

* There is something going on with the receiver when you select an HDMI source and then select something else. My DirecTV H20 receiver goes bananas when the Pioneer selects it. DirecTV doesn't know why and Pioneer won't respond.

* The little doors on the optical inputs are very fragile - I've already broken one, and once broken it won't grip the optical connector very well.

Having said all that, I am not about to change at this point. I've been able to work around all these little oddities, and it does sound great and runs very cool. I'd probably lose my shirt selling the receiver and it does sound great.

The Outlaw (www.outlawaudio.com) gear looks very good with an excellent customer-service reputation, but I'm sure it has its quirks too. As usual, YMMV.


-Brian n8wrl

Polk,
I think you may wish to try the Onkyo TX-SR503 with either the M60 or M80 first, before you bother to look at switching out to a more powerful amp/receiver. There are a number of forum members here that successfully use Onkyo receivers to power both the M60 and M80 model speakers. Quite a few receiver manufacturers state 8ohm only as sort of a "cover your a**" policy. Despite that many well designed receivers will easily handle the very benign 4ohm M80 load.

Is there a problem with audio coming from DVI or HDMI. isn't that the purpose of these cables. I have a Pioneer VSX-72 and just got a HD TV and a HD cable box that has DVI. I was planning on getting one of those DVI to HDMI cables. Is that a bad idea?

The problem I ran into was a DVD player with DVI output. The pioneer only has HDMI for digital. HDMI is backward compatable with DVI but includes audio too. DVI does not. Sooo, a DVI-to-HDMI cable works and transmits the video, but there will be no audio on the HDMI.

What I ended up doing was going DVI->HDMI to my Plasma, and optical to the Pioneer for audio.

-Brian n8wrl

-Brian