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Older Kenwood AVRs- KA-894 and similar. Experience? Opinions?

Cahudson42

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Recent threads have covered AX-596 etc Yamaha etc. I've noticed that similar vintage Kenwood's can also be picked up for peanuts. Are any of them any good - mainly just as power Amplifier's? For example, the KA-894 has a pair of 'adapter' jumpers. It seems removing them and using it's 'input' side may provide a more direct path to the power amps, bypassing the ancient preamp stuff. And while this particular one is billed as a 5.1, it does seem to offer stereo only. Maybe the PS is not bad when used in 2-channel? But there are also disturbing 'value engineering' signs with the cheap clip-type speaker connections..

Kenwood Amateur Radio gear used to be top rate. Did any of this come thru on their audio units like this?
 
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Cahudson42

Cahudson42

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Perhaps some of our younger members may not be familiar with the term 'value engineering'..

Essentially, 'value engineering' is designing for planned obsolescense. It is an engineering intellectual masturbation attempting to justify designing and manufacturing crap. The logic sort of goes like this: ' This product will be obsolete in three years anyway. Therefore, it makes no sense at all to design for operating limits and to specify components that will last for much more than three years. To do so simply adds cost to manufacture, which then by necessity must be passed on as added cost to the consumer'.. Self -fullfilling for sure...
 

NTomokawa

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Audition them. If you like the sound and they cost peanuts, why not? That's the fun with vintage audio equipment. Don't like the way it sounds? Flip it for the same amount of peanuts you paid and find something else.

Then again the KA/894 appears to be from 1994, which is really not that "vintage". That's the era where a whole bunch of manufacturers were cranking out "black plastic crap", a term I learned from AudioKarma.
 

bigx5murf

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