AV Receiver Options

[karenlee]

(so wish I had a US shipping address sometimes)

Actually, you can have just that. Google the phrase 'USA forwarding address' and you will see how to create an account at a forwarding house in the USA. They will provide you with an address in the USA where you can have your parcels delivered to, then they will forward it on to you. You will still have to pay customs, though, so that negates a lot of the savings.

[brathnach]

Brathnach, I may have missed something, but your 600 Euros converts to about $815 US dollars, so you may have a bigger budget than you thought....

I know where you are coming from Sam but I meant that in purchasing value rather than currency value. Sometimes looking up US sites for such goods makes me a bit envious ;(. Probably has more to do with purchasing power or country of manufacture, I'm not so sure but often times it's difficult to get a product here for the equivalent amount of euros as it is priced in dollars. i.e. an item for $600 there and rarely can get for any less than €600 here.

Actually, you can have just that. Google the phrase 'USA forwarding address' and you will see how to create an account at a forwarding house in the USA. They will provide you with an address in the USA where you can have your parcels delivered to, then they will forward it on to you. You will still have to pay customs, though, so that negates a lot of the savings.

It really is the price of shipping and customs that destroys a deal (esp weight of a receiver). Also customs is just examining everything these days so nothing gets through without duty/excise/VAT etc. Also I'm not sure but I think that most amps etc come with locally rated power supplies so for saving nothing I'd probably end up with a 110V unit while its 240V here.

At that price range, I'd recommend a Denon. I owned one for nearly 10 years, just gave it to a neighbor 4 months ago as I wanted HDMI switching. Rock solid, worked great. A bunch of us have them. (Denon makes both their own line & marantz)

Thanks for that advice IVB. I'll take a look at some Denons also. I'll end up spending around the 600 eur mark or else I may drop 300 euro on a second hand Yamaha RX-V2700, which is a bit of a risk I know. Its a pretty large room and so I also need to keep in the >100W/Channel region if possible. But definetly going to take a look at a few Denons now. Just good to know what units I'm safe with from a CQC and reliability perspective.

Thanks very much indeed,

Jim

[Shaky]

I bought an Onkyo from the 2012 line-up and CQC talks to it just fine over ip so that's another option...had to send it for Warranty repair though already. They had some HDMI issues in that year range which are apparently now fixed. I have a new HDMI board which was 100% covered by warranty so still happy. Great sound and feature set for the $400 CDN. I paid for it

[wuench]

I have had 4 Denons in my life and 1 Sony. I have one Denon amp that is 20 years old. I gave another to a friend that was 15 years old (and I got that as a refurb). The Sony died after 4 years of use.

The only issues I have had were with firmware updates on my Denon 3808. I once had a failed update that bricked the box (I now stop CQC from talking to it while doing firmware updates) it was repaired under warranty. The last update introduced some sort of network bug that causes it to occasionally go offline network-wise and requires a cold boot to get it back up. Unfortunately they aren't updating the firmware on the 3808 anymore and there is no way to rollback so I have a trigger for CQC to cycle the power strip it is attached to. The firmware update is a little nail-biting as it reaches out over the internet to a server and there is very little feedback. I am not sure if they have improved that process in newer models.

Both my Denons with network control work well with CQC.