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Onkyo TX-RZ50 Review (Home Theater AVR)

Rate this product:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 96 31.6%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 114 37.5%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 63 20.7%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 31 10.2%

  • Total voters
    304

BJL

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If it has full, that leans me back to Onkyo not Denon.

I got the "limited/full" info on the Denon site telling the rollout dates in March and costs for Dirac.

The Dirac site says the Limited does only frequencies below 500Hz

thanks
Pioneer (and I presume other Onkyo family members) come with a license for the full range version of Dirac. It doesn't provide dynamic bass management (setting crossovers), but it will adjust the subwoofer EQ, impulse response and levels relative to the other speakers.
 
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Dougey_Jones

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Pioneer (and I presume other Onkyo family members) come with a license for the full range version of Dirac. It doesn't provide dynamic bass management (setting crossovers), but it will adjust the subwoofer EQ, impulse response and levels relative to the other speakers.
I know a lot of people like to use Dirac or Audyssey just to solve bass management and let their speakers natural response play out in their room, but I can tell you from experience and from flipping back and forth in stereo and surround modes that Dirac makes a subtle but very distinct difference in the sound quality all the way to 20khz. My surround suite is very neutral (Revel Performa) and I still prefer the output of full Dirac to bass management only.

FWIW, my "curtains" are set at 37hz and 17khz, I'm using the *new* Dirac house curve which looks an awful lot like the Harman curve but with a bass boost. Used the thirteen position measurement option with 90 degree mic calibration file on a UMIK-1.

Sounds awesome.
 

SDMatt

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Amirm measures the Onkyo TX-RZ50 with a SINAD of 97. Innocent question: Is this measurement of SINAD audibly unfavorable? Can a SINAD of 97 be audibly distinguished from a product with a SINAD of 100?
 

Dougey_Jones

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Amirm measures the Onkyo TX-RZ50 with a SINAD of 97. Innocent question: Is this measurement of SINAD audibly unfavorable? Can a SINAD of 97 be audibly distinguished from a product with a SINAD of 100?
I’d challenge anybody on this forum to distinguish -97db from -101db (x3700) or an even lower noise floor, I’ll put my money where my mouth is too, easy money.

That’s why I think the voting for the review of the RZ50 is laughable.
 

dlaloum

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SINAD includes both Noise and THD.... you can get the same SINAD measure with high noise and low THD or vice versa....

There are components with Noise at 105db and THD at circa 70db - they can be excellent sounding pieces of gear! - the SINAD for these would be driven by the THD (ie: SINAD 70)

Roughly speaking the threshold of audibility is somewhere around 60db for THD, but substantially higher for Noise (probably circa 80)

Once you get to a SINAD of 90+ I doubt anyone could identify the components with differing SINAD - it is substantially beyond the thresholds of audibility for the varous components that make up SINAD.
 

Dougey_Jones

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SINAD includes both Noise and THD.... you can get the same SINAD measure with high noise and low THD or vice versa....

There are components with Noise at 105db and THD at circa 70db - they can be excellent sounding pieces of gear! - the SINAD for these would be driven by the THD (ie: SINAD 70)

Roughly speaking the threshold of audibility is somewhere around 60db for THD, but substantially higher for Noise (probably circa 80)

Once you get to a SINAD of 90+ I doubt anyone could identify the components with differing SINAD - it is substantially beyond the thresholds of audibility for the varous components that make up SINAD.

Exactly, which is why after a certain point, roughly 90-100db, I start prioritizing feature set, ease of use, aesthetics and other things that are important to me. So in the case of the RZ50 vs x3700 debate, I prefer Dirac, so it's a no brainer.
 

Sycraft

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SINAD includes both Noise and THD.... you can get the same SINAD measure with high noise and low THD or vice versa....

There are components with Noise at 105db and THD at circa 70db - they can be excellent sounding pieces of gear! - the SINAD for these would be driven by the THD (ie: SINAD 70)

Roughly speaking the threshold of audibility is somewhere around 60db for THD, but substantially higher for Noise (probably circa 80)

Once you get to a SINAD of 90+ I doubt anyone could identify the components with differing SINAD - it is substantially beyond the thresholds of audibility for the varous components that make up SINAD.

While I like the SINAD measurement and find it useful I do think some people, particularly around here, go too hard on it as a "goodness" measure. While lower is better, it does stop audibly mattering after a point and more important is that, as you note, the components are not equal. If your room is quiet, you can hear noise at pretty low levels. I got my computer room at my last place down to around 25dBSPL. In that, even pretty faint amp noise was audible. However, harmonic distortion is just much harder to hear. Even on test tones you'll find you can get more distortion than you'd think before you'll notice it. Try it a wave editor some time. 0.1% is getting pretty well imperceptible. There's also the issue that speakers add distortion, generally way more than the amp.

So, while I always want lower SINAD, I'm more concerned about the "N" component than the "D" component.
 

peng

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While I like the SINAD measurement and find it useful I do think some people, particularly around here, go too hard on it as a "goodness" measure. While lower is better, it does stop audibly mattering after a point and more important is that, as you note, the components are not equal. If your room is quiet, you can hear noise at pretty low levels. I got my computer room at my last place down to around 25dBSPL. In that, even pretty faint amp noise was audible. However, harmonic distortion is just much harder to hear. Even on test tones you'll find you can get more distortion than you'd think before you'll notice it. Try it a wave editor some time. 0.1% is getting pretty well imperceptible. There's also the issue that speakers add distortion, generally way more than the amp.

So, while I always want lower SINAD, I'm more concerned about the "N" component than the "D" component.

I don't get that impression though, as on this thread, people are concerned about the behavior of the "nanny", not the measured SINAD. On the other long thread about the Denon AVR, people were also not so much concerned about SINAD in the absolute sense, but about what Amir called it "regression" approach, on downgrading the DAC chip from AK4458 to the TI chip that has 13 to 14 dB lower SINAD.

In that case, we can also say the TI chip's 93 dB SINAD is good enough, but it is natural that people don't like losing 13 dB SINAD just going from a 2020 model to a 2022 year model especially when the price increase is higher the year over year inflation number. It seems to me when people mentioned the lower SINAD number too many times, it would get interpreted as people focusing on something that doesn't matter, when it does, not in terms of sound quality degradation, but about something more as a matter of principle.
 
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techsamurai

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In that case, we can also say the TI chip's 93 dB SINAD is good enough, but it is natural that people don't like losing 13 dB SINAD just going from a 2020 model to a 2022 year model especially when the price increase is higher the year over year inflation number. It seems to me when people mentioned the lower SINAD number too many times, it would get interpreted as people focusing on something that doesn't matter, when it does, not in terms of sound quality degradation, but about something more as a matter of principle.

Just to be clear, are you referring to the Denon 3700h and 3800h and the DAC change?
 

ivo.f.doma

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I want to ask someone from Europe, does the TX RZ50 really have such an ugly green display (green letters) as seen in the pictures on the internet? I have a nice white one on my old Pioneer, see pictures, and the older Onkyo 3100, 3400 also had white. I would also like to have a white display on the new receiver.
20230129_205053.jpg
20230129_205127.jpg
20230203_110847.jpg
 

techsamurai

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I want to ask someone from Europe, does the TX RZ50 really have such an ugly green display (green letters) as seen in the pictures on the internet? I have a nice white one on my old Pioneer, see pictures, and the older Onkyo 3100, 3400 also had white. I would also like to have a white display on the new receiver.View attachment 262778View attachment 262779View attachment 262780
I think the RZ50 has a very nice fascia - it's not modern but it's extremely clean. The letter may be green but I'm sure you'd turn the auto display off so they turn off after a few seconds.
 

Dougey_Jones

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Had an interesting use case question for RZ50 owners. Dirac does such a great job that I honestly prefer the output in my room to my stereo separates, but I would really prefer to use my DAC/Preamp/Amp combo. Does anybody know if the Dirac output is pushed out of the two HDMI outputs? If it is, then I could connect an HDMI extractor to the secondary output, and run an optical cable from the extractor to my Schiit Modius and save myself having to buy a MiniDSP Flex...

I could obviously just try it, but curious if anybody has thought about this, or already done it?

Edit: I got an old extractor out of the drawer that only supports 1080p and it DID successfully grab the stereo audio and output via optical to my DAC/Preamp. Only problem is, it didn't seem to carry the Dirac profile along with it, AND as you might have guessed, the subs continued playing their merry tune and at a volume that was now independent of the rest of the system. I can still see uses for this though. At the press of a button I could mute the Onkyo receiver and have it act as a digital transport for my separate stereo setup.

Thoughts welcome..
 
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Dougey_Jones

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I think the RZ50 has a very nice fascia - it's not modern but it's extremely clean. The letter may be green but I'm sure you'd turn the auto display off so they turn off after a few seconds.
There's a dimmer button, but as far as I can tell, no way to turn the front display completely off. If you have it in Pure Direct mode, the display turns all the way off, but I haven't found any other way.
 

mathew

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This is a review and detailed measurements of the Onkyo TX-RZ50 9.2 8K THX Certified AV Receiver. It was purchased new by a member and drop shipped to me for testing. It costs US $1,399.
View attachment 186165
Looks like all AVR companies are trying to break the mold of just dual rotary controls to something different. While I appreciate the additional buttons and knobs here, they are impossible to see in the dark as far as labels. Here is the back panel:

View attachment 186167
I appreciated the quick start-up and the high resolution of the on-screen display. It was also nice of it to tell me at the end of setup that there was a new firmware. What I didn't appreciate was it not recognizing my hardwired Ethernet cable requiring a second try even though I had it plugged it a while back. Update was slow which I could tolerate but not finishing with "Update Complete" (or something like it) and then sitting there non-functional! You had to power cycle it to get it to work.

The distinguishing aspect of this AVR is adoption of Dirac by a mass market company like Onkyo in their AVR. Dirac room EQ should perform far better than simpler scheme in the AVR (although I have not tested either in this instance). There is a nice app to control it all as well so you don't need a computer if you don't want to have one (and can use AVR's own mic).

Note: the follow set of measurements are expanded from my normal set which is already quite extensive for AVRs. If you are new to these reviews, don't be taken back. Most of them are for the diehard measurement folks in the forum. :) I will summarize everything in the conclusion section.

Onkyo TX-RZ50 DAC Measurements
As usual I start with the important bit which is how well the AVR converts digital audio samples to analog. Pure mode was selected for all the measurements (see later in the review on effect of this setting). Let's start with S/PDIF:

View attachment 186172

As usual I set the volume control such that we get 2 volt output which required setting it to 84.5. Unit displays "Reference" at 82 by the way but at that level, you won't be able to drive all amplifiers to their full power rating. Let's now switch to HDMI:


View attachment 186173

General performance is the same but now we have symmetrical spikes around our main tone which indicates low frequency jitter component. This is unfortunate. Putting SINAD which is the relative sum of noise and distortion in context we get slightly above average rating:

View attachment 186174

Since the unit can output more than 2 volts, let's see the full range of output vs performance:

View attachment 186177
Good to see you have headroom up to 3.5 volt if you need it to drive a low gain amplifier.

Measuring dynamic range we get:
View attachment 186175

Multitone test shows jitter components we saw in the dashboard which I ignored for my distortion-free range computation:
View attachment 186178

Oddly when I ran my specific jitter test, it was S/PDIF which fell behind HDMI:

View attachment 186179

Objectively neither performance is proper but from audibility point of view, spikes are low enough as to not matter.

Linearity was "good enough" for the class:

View attachment 186180

I was pleasantly surprised to see a choice of filters although you only have a choice of two (and "auto" which seems to set to Sharp):

View attachment 186181

Notice the typical roll off in the audible band with slow filter so my choice would be the sharp one. The filter choice naturally makes a difference in our THD+N versus frequency:

View attachment 186183

As you see the slow filter does better but I think that is because it is attenuating the in-band response, reducing the noise and power of harmonics. Either way though, this is not anything to write home about.

While we are here, let's see the effect of Pure mode:

View attachment 186184

Odd to see that low frequency rise in distortion.

Base Management and Pure Mode Investigation
These AVRs are opaque when it comes to what they do when they activate their digital processing and accompanying resampling. So I decided to investigate with frequency response measurement using 192 kHz sampling. This rate is usually outside of unit's internal processing rate so if there is some, we will see its effect. Let's see what happens when we turn Pure mode on and off:

View attachment 186185

It is clear that turning ON the Pure mode disables all internal resampling giving us almost full bandwidth of 96 kHz which we would expect. Turn Pure mode off and response gets truncated sharply. My guess is that internal sample rate is 44.1 or likely 48 kHz.

I then configured an 80 Hz high-pass filter for the fronts and measured its effect:

View attachment 186186

As soon as you enable bass management, resampling is forced on you (blue curve). This is a shame as bass processing should be doable at higher sample rate. I guess the pipeline is all or nothing when it comes to processing. Fortunately you have the option of using Pure mode but that defeats bass management so no bookshelf speaker may apply. You have to use full range speakers.

Notice that this run in Pure mode (red and green) has a spike. This would come and go depending on settings of the frequency response sweep (green spike). It may be a bug or ringing of the resampling filter. Onkyo should investigate and fix this. Fortunately it is at 60 kHz so not an audible concern but maybe it pushes some external amp into oscillation.

Onkyo TX-RZ50 Amplifier Measurements
My goal here is to figure out how good the internal amplifier is relative to an external one. This is hard to do as we have to tease out the transparency level of various ways of feeding the amplifier. Let's start with analog input by adjusting our gain to be 29 dB:

View attachment 186188

If you don't use the Pure mode -- which is probably how most of you use it -- you will lose performance:

View attachment 186189

Sadly that is in the form of rising noise floor. Going with the better of the two, the ranking is not great and well below competition:


View attachment 186190

Some of you have been looking at using external DACs as a way to improve performance of these AV Products. There, you would be feeding the amplifier up to 2 volts in unbalanced mode so I decided to test that condition. To get to the same 5 watt output, I cranked the volume down until I achieved that output:


View attachment 186191

Noise floor goes down enough to buy us 3 dB more SINAD. Let's do the same with HDMI input, i.e. using internal DAC:


View attachment 186192

So you could do better with external DAC but it is likely not worth the hassle as the amp itself doesn't have much more to give.

Crosstalk was below average:
View attachment 186193

In Pure mode, frequency response is extended and nice:
View attachment 186194

And here is our multitone test:

View attachment 186195

Disappointing.

Onkyo TX-RZ50 Power Amplifier Testing
This testing cost me anther hour of sleep (went to bed near 4:00 am!). I started with measuring 4 ohm power as I usually do and got ridiculously low level of output before clipping. I checked all the settings, set the amp to 6 vs 4 ohm and back, power save mode off, etc. but nothing would fix it. On a hunch, I disconnected the power cable, waited a bit and powered the unit back on. I got full power twice but then it limited:


View attachment 186197

Clearly there is some monitoring going on internally causing the amplifier to go into ECO/power limiting mode. With 8 ohm load, I didn't see this problem:
View attachment 186198

Given that vast majority of speakers today are 4 ohm or even lower, this is a serious problem. I could understand it if the amp was cooking but it was quite cool running with the upper fan off. Traditionally this mode would be triggered if you set the amplifier to 4 ohm mode but per above, this did not have an effect here.

Given this problem I could not run my max and peak power. But did run my frequency sweeps post a power cable removal:
View attachment 186199

Notice how it pulled power back half way through the test. I am hoping this is microprocessor controlled so can be fixed with a firmware upgrade. This is a showstopper bug as far as I am concerned.

Conclusions

The inclusion of proper Room EQ in mid-priced AVRs is major news indeed. Alas, my job here is to characterize the performance of the platform itself and the news there is not good. The amplifier has serious power limiting "feature" and even without it, it is not competitive with other products out there. Company can and should do better than this. I am confident a clean up pass with measurements can produce a better product. For too long review sites have done such a cursory job here as to allow these practices to continue. Hopefully that era is behind us. I know a number of companies are taking this domain seriously like the companies did in 1970s. So if Onkyo doesn't get with the program, it will fall behind.

The morass of pipeline processing also needs documentation and this is a message for the entire industry. Don't leave the customer in the dark and lead to dissatisfaction when they read an analysis like mine. Up the processing capability and make it a feature to perform all the functions at the native sample rate of the content. I think people will pay a few hundred dollars more to get this.

Anyway, I can't recommend the Onkyo TX-RZ50. If they fix the power handling issue, they may then get a marginal recommendation from me.

-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Andrew Robinson gave this unit such a rave review. Really, the so called audiophile reviewers seem to suck up to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers for freebies.
 

2therock

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Hello, I'm considering this AVR as I have access to a great deal on a new one.

My personal demands are low as I will turn up parts of movies or and such but no continuous ear bleeding volumes. I am kind of in morning over retiring my Pioneer SC-75 as its not up to date and I have a new LG OLED C2 55" TV and want to match up the tech and do some auto racing gaming. It is has, and still serves me well.

I really enjoy my all Dahlquist 7.1 speaker set. I have had them for decades after reading a great review on them had them imported from Canada. No Regrets.

I want to post the speaker details for your comments on them with the TX-RZ50. See the link below. The accompanying photos are old, the Plasma is gone, The OPPO and the Onkyo SACD units remain. The sleeping chamber TV is a larger LG LED.

My HT

Thanks
 
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With the announcement of the Integra DX 8.4, I guess an Onkyo upgrade to the RZ50 (RZ70?) should be coming anytime soon. Hope they keep the option for DLBC multi-sub licensing the Integra has.
 

Dougey_Jones

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With the announcement of the Integra DX 8.4, I guess an Onkyo upgrade to the RZ50 (RZ70?) should be coming anytime soon. Hope they keep the option for DLBC multi-sub licensing the Integra has.
Is there a chance they’ll add DLBC to the RZ50? It’d be worth it to a lot of people even if they charged a software license fee.
 

Rottmannash

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Is there a chance they’ll add DLBC to the RZ50? It’d be worth it to a lot of people even if they charged a software license fee.
Don't think they can, as the 2 sub outs are internally Y-spit. Of course if one wanted to use DLBC with one sub I guess that could be done.
 
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Don't think they can, as the 2 sub outs are internally Y-spit. Of course if one wanted to use DLBC with one sub I guess that could be done.
Standard DLBC license is for just one sub, for multiple subs management there’s a separate, more expensive, license.
 
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