Denon/Marantz - the end is near (or not)

[TonyJZX]

does anyone truly think these storied brands are gone?

i think masimo has a lot of buyers remorse... in that why would be a medical electronics company get into this but these brands have huge value and consumer mindshare... i mean even someone like B&W has moved into the mainstream with their personal electronics line

i expect a slow selloff? maybe a quick one? maybe Bose wants to toss their hat in the ring?

 

[EWL5]

does anyone truly think these storied brands are gone?

i think masimo has a lot of buyers remorse... in that why would be a medical electronics company get into this but these brands have huge value and consumer mindshare... i mean even someone like B&W has moved into the mainstream with their personal electronics line

i expect a slow selloff? maybe a quick one? maybe Bose wants to toss their hat in the ring?

More like "CEO remorse"! They got rid of Joe Kiani much too late and now Masimo is left holding the bag!

 

[Aerith Gainsborough]

Sure 8/120 support will have to come to future AVRs, and it's not odd since TVs are just getting bigger and bigger. It's been possible to purchase a 98" 144Hz LCD for around 2000 euro during the latest black friday.

It's not that people need higher than 4k, it's still going to come
They still want to sell the movies to us once again

Just because something is possible to do, doesn't mean it will get accepted by the consumers.
Ultimately consumers need to SEE a difference and if they can't, they won't buy.

In that area, video is MUCH harder for the merchants than the audio world, where (for whatever reason) people are used to being sold stuff that they cannot possibly hear. Just look at this very forum, where people fret about SINAD values waaay below audibility.
I get it: we all love engineering excellence and get starry eyed when a device measures spectacularly. I'm no exception to that. But when the rubber meets the road .. erm ... speaker generated soundwave hits the eardrum: -80dB SINAD is more than sufficient to do the job and do it well (as long as noise is low enough). :'D

I think 8K makes perfectly sense, especially for projectors. But not 8K120. At least not in the foreseeable future, since even highest end GPUs need to to resort to cheats ("AI" fake frame interpolation) and "AI"-upscaling to even sort of manage 4K120.

Meanwhile, the movie world is still mostly stuck at a lousy 24FPS ... LMAO. :'D

 

[chelgrian]

Just because something is possible to do, doesn't mean it will get accepted by the consumers.
Ultimately consumers need to SEE a difference and if they can't, they won't buy.

In that area, video is MUCH harder for the merchants than the audio world, where (for whatever reason) people are used to being sold stuff that they cannot possibly hear. Just look at this very forum, where people fret about SINAD values waaay below audibility.
I get it: we all love engineering excellence and get starry eyed when a device measures spectacularly. I'm no exception to that. But when the rubber meets the road .. erm ... speaker generated soundwave hits the eardrum: -80dB SINAD is more than sufficient to do the job and do it well (as long as noise is low enough). :'D

I think 8K makes perfectly sense, especially for projectors. But not 8K120. At least not in the foreseeable future, since even highest end GPUs need to to resort to cheats ("AI" fake frame interpolation) and "AI"-upscaling to even sort of manage 4K120.

Meanwhile, the movie world is still mostly stuck at a lousy 24FPS ... LMAO. :'D

IMAX are doing their best to drag people to 48fps but there just a generation of directors of photography who think 24fps motion judder is just the ticket and want to preserve it. In film projection 24fps the shutter was dropped twice for each frame so the flicker was always at 48Hz even though the motion judder was at 24.

 

[Bleib]

Ultimately consumers need to SEE a difference and if they can't, they won't buy.

That's not true. Get the latest phone even if there is little to no difference, even sometimes it's worse. The power of marketing, the fear of losing out, the fear of standing out... commercials target all these things.

We've gone up resolutions for quite a long time now, and it's easy for consumers to think "I might as well get 8k now already" before it becomes the norm.
My AVR clearly states 8k on the box for a reason as well.

But I agree on higher framerate, I wish 60fps was the norm

Higher resolution movies should also look better on big-screen VR

 

[GXAlan]

I think we've reached an end-point in home theater. Where do we go from here?

+1

Having gone from Marantz to Sony to Yamaha to HTP-1 to Trinnov over the last 5 years, I have had a chance to play with all of the modern room correction setups. While each step offered a noticeable difference I would still say that we are just looking at 15% improvement from the basic RC to the advanced ones.

Upgrading speakers has made a big difference but along those lines, the DSPs that worked best with soundfield processing also sounded the best in my non-dedicated rooms, which is why I preferred the Yamaha and even Sony over the Audyssey and the Dirac HTP-1 setup benefitted from having stuff like Bose 901’s in the rear.

What core HT features could we update that would make an e.g.: 4800H obsolete in the same vein that my 10yr old Yammy was holding me back?

None. It’s one reason why it’s more reasonable to get a higher end processor or receiver with expected long term support. Even if the 4800 and 3800 are similar in overall performance, you have to imagine that the Shirakawa factory is more likely to survive any downsizing of D&M due to the low end getting pushed out by soundbars versus the high end supporting higher asp’s.

Again, Sony VAIO PCs is the example .

If obsolescence happens in HT, I'd say it would be in the Display sector. OLEDs only have a limited lifespan by design

My parents had a flagship Sony XBR RPTV which continued to give great results even 15+ years later, despite lacking HDMI and only being 768p due to superb scaling and engineering.

I have a the 75” XBR X940E which still provides a competitive picture quality today 7 years later. However, if you look at AVSForum, the LED diffuser breaks around this point (although it happens seemingly more common with wall mounted versus stand mounted TVs, presumably heat).

I think if you avoid burn in, OLEDs will certainly last 20 years. I actually have the 7.6” Kodak OLED picture frame from 2009 and while the CPU is slow and resolution is limited , the screen is actually still working well.

 

[Aerith Gainsborough]

I have a the 75” XBR X940E which still provides a competitive picture quality today 7 years later.

My X900F is 6 years old now. I'd say the picture is still competitive in SDR.
Main HDR drawback is that it only has like 9 dimming zones, so the blooming is pretty noticeable in dark scenes.

Other than that, brightness and colors are fantastic. Since I run it at low brightness (95% of the content is sill SDR anyway), I'm also not worried about heat nuking any diffusors like it does in edge-lit models.

 

[GXAlan]

My X900F is 6 years old now. I'd say the picture is still competitive in SDR.
Main HDR drawback is that it only has like 9 dimming zones, so the blooming is pretty noticeable in dark scenes.

Other than that, brightness and colors are fantastic. Since I run it at low brightness (95% of the content is sill SDR anyway), I'm also not worried about heat nuking any diffusors like it does in edge-lit models.

A lot of streaming is HDR but a lot of HDR isn’t pushing the dark scene with ultra bright hotspots. But that’s exactly the point: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

The new stuff is “better” but in terms of enjoyment, unlike the transition among content formats or SDTV to HDTV, it’s still really enjoyable. The Sony has good tone mapping and if you think about most actual front projection systems, they are high gamut SDR setups.

The X940E is full array back lit with “over 250 zones”, but it was the first to hit 1000 nits in its thickness. The Z9D was a full inch thicker, presumably allowing for better cooling.

The smartTV stuff ended up getting obsolete more quickly just due to expectations for responsiveness, but an AppleTV works wonders.

 

[Aerith Gainsborough]

The smartTV stuff ended up getting obsolete more quickly just due to expectations for responsiveness, but an AppleTV works wonders.

Haha, oh yeah.
My X900F's apps are moving at a snails pace. Disney+ works well enough (barring Dolby Vision bugginess that is a known issue of this model) but Paramount+ ... no way to get stutter/pop free playback.
Not sure about Amazon/Netflix these days, since I don't use them.

I just wish these streaming services would stop excluding PC. Kinda ridiculous to have to contend with super slow Android apps on a smart TV, when you have a monster of a gaming PC hooked up to it. <_<

 

[kyuu]

I just wish these streaming services would stop excluding PC. Kinda ridiculous to have to contend with super slow Android apps on a smart TV, when you have a monster of a gaming PC hooked up to it. <_<

Netflix, Disney, and Hulu have Windows apps. As for the others, something wrong with the website?

 

[MoreWatts]

I think you can stream 4K HDR content through the Edge browser on PC/Windows 11.

I've set up MAX, Peacock, Paramount+, FloSports, AMC+, Freevee, Tubi, Pluto as 'installed apps' thru Edge. My TV indicates HDR is activated.

As a bonus, the uBlock Origin adblocker sometimes disables ads in a way that must cause chagrin to the streamer services.

Btw, I don't use Edge as my regular browser. I'm a Firefox holdout (woo-hoo, 2.8% market-share!)

 

[Aerith Gainsborough]

Netflix, Disney, and Hulu have Windows apps. As for the others, something wrong with the website?

720p / 1080p max.
That's what's wrong.

No clue about American streaming services but over here, the only way to get 4K is via my TV's internal apps.
When you look at movies in the D+ Edge App, it even flat out only says "HD", as opposed to 4K on my TV. It's the same TV that's hooked up to my PC as the only monitor, in case you were wondering.

4K playback of commercial movies on PC is all but impossible w/o going "YARRR, Matey!"

 

[Mort]

Wouldn't want to be D&M when devices like miniDSP Flex HT are better processors at 1/10th the price. Is their whole AVR line built on having a monopoly on Dolby/DTS decoding? Don't feel compelled to open my wallet knowing I can get better performance for far less elsewhere.

It's really very doable with an HD fury arcane ($250) and an Apple TV 4k ($250). I didn't have to buy an AVR for my second 5.1 system using those with a MiniDsp Flex HT and a Buckeye amp.

It's not 1/10th though, not close. You'll get more though. Depends a lot on how much you pay for the amps.

 

[kyuu]

720p / 1080p max.
That's what's wrong.

Well dang. I almost never do streaming on the PC but I was under the impression that native apps and certain services on the Edge browser allowed full-quality playback. Trying it now, though, seems not. Yeah, that sucks.

 

[Joe Smith]

Received an e-mail this morning promoting the brand-new (?) Onkyo website: https://onkyo.com/welcome-to-the-new-onkyo

It looks like someone's putting some money behind the brand...but the positioning video strikes me as a bit cheesy...and the slogan "The Heartbeat of Entertainment" seems pretty meh... The voice over in the video is also a bit odd...not quite a Japanese voice...but trying to sound like that? I guess my main quibble is it sounds thin and kind of hollow, which seems an odd choice for a sound products company.

I'm an Onkyo fan, though, and I do hope they survive.

P.S. Looks like they have thrown in with Klipsch for "environmental sound" speaker systems etc. More emphasis by far on AV than traditional 2-channel equipment.

 

[peng]

It's really very doable with an HD fury arcane ($250) and an Apple TV 4k ($250). I didn't have to buy an AVR for my second 5.1 system using those with a MiniDsp Flex HT and a Buckeye amp.

It's not 1/10th though, not close. You'll get more though. Depends a lot on how much you pay for the amps.

So you are able to enjoy Atmos and DTS:X and the upmixed versions with that setup? Why Apple TV in particular, are there less expensive options? Thanks.

 

[ban25]

So you are able to enjoy Atmos and DTS:X and the upmixed versions with that setup? Why Apple TV in particular, are there less expensive options? Thanks.

The best that could be achieved with such a setup is a bed-layer 7.1 with the Apple TV decoding the DD+/DTS-HD base layer and sending 7.1 PCM to the MiniDSP.

 

[peng]

The best that could be achieved with such a setup is a bed-layer 7.1 with the Apple TV decoding the DD+/DTS-HD base layer and sending 7.1 PCM to the MiniDSP.

That I know, just not sure about 5.1.2 Atmos/DTS:X and the upmixes. If the HDMI eARC device such as a TV or Apple atV 4K can decode those, then I thought they could output the decoded signal in PCM to the Flex HT via HDMI eARC capable ports.

 

[ban25]

That I know, just not sure about 5.1.2 Atmos/DTS:X and the upmixes. If the HDMI eARC device such as a TV or Apple atV 4K can decode those, then I thought they could output the decoded signal in PCM to the Flex HT via HDMI eARC capable ports.

I'm fairly certain the Apple TV just pulls the 7.1 base layer out of the DD+ Atmos stream and encodes it straight, so there is no mixing into height channels nor any way to tell the Apple TV that you want to try to stuff 5.1.2 into a 7.1 PCM stream.

 

[chelgrian]

That I know, just not sure about 5.1.2 Atmos/DTS:X and the upmixes. If the HDMI eARC device such as a TV or Apple atV 4K can decode those, then I thought they could output the decoded signal in PCM to the Flex HT via HDMI eARC capable ports.

Apple TV can’t do that and it would require a non standard channel layout for the PCM8.

Recent versions of Logic Pro X can do 5.1.2 like this out of HDMI but since that is for content creation it’s assumed the user can cope with this and they have dedicated a system to the ‘wrong’ ordering.

It’s particularly infuriating since HDMI 2 is specified to allow up to 32 channels of PCM but to my knowledge no one has ever implemented support for this I expect this is Dolby’s doing again but it’s hard to tell without seeing the contracts they have with manufacturers.