I was of the opinion that it was a defect in the Onkyo. Not knowing for sure that it was a defect, or a real limit, and after lots of research mostly to do with the dynamic between ohms and watts, and some prompting by other members of this forum, I decided not take a chance, and pre-order the amp (with a four plus month wait time) and looked for a reasonably priced avr / avp with the ability to be a preamp. I selected the Denon (even after Amir's review) and got it a month before the Buckeye amp. That's been my A/B testing to this point. So some of my opinion is objective, the Onkyo was flawed. Some is subjective, the speakers sounded good with Denon, and even better as a pre amp to the Buckeye.<snip>
If the Onkyo was clipping at low & medium volume that was not a power issue but likley something was triggering a protection circuit or the AVR had an issue/defect. It is also possible the inputs were being over driven somehow.
ONKYO's TX-NR6050 Specs are decent, they rate some items down to 3ohms, if true this amp should power just about anything typical to 100db peaks at 10feet away. If it did not then friend I am leaning toward defect... or horrible engineering. (which it seems some AVR's are sporting)
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The Denon as I am sure you know was reviewed here and did fine IMO. It probably has a touch more power than the ONKYO but really just a 1db or 2 of extra juice for 2mains, maybe. So again I think if the DENON performed fine but the ONKYO did not they seems to be something wrong. They basically have the same real world power output.
Denon AVR-X3800H Review
This is a review and detailed measurements of the Denon AVR-X3800H 9.4 Home Theater Audio/Video Receiver. It was kindly drop shipped to me by a member and costs US $1,699. Not much to say about the look of the unit as it is pretty much similar/same as last generations. Here is the back panel...www.audiosciencereview.com
Who could fault anyone for buying that Purifi?
I am thinking about one myself.
I have a bunch of amps here but no SOTA amps.
I am really interested in doing that blind comparison I mentioned with a SOTA Purifi or two bridged Benchmarks and a basic good high powered amp.
There is no question that with some speakers when I crank it up that 400watts that I have sure seems to do a better job than my 125watt/channel stuff. I have yet to blind test any of these amps here though, I keep planning it. Soon. It will be a lot easier than speakers which I also have plans to blind test some of them. I am really curious how biased my sighted testing is. If Harman ever calls me up for being a test subject I will be out the door and on the way rain, sleet or snow.
P.S. Buckeye was upfront about the wait time and I've been nothing but pleased with the service.