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GREAT RECEIVERS
One large reason for this is the increasing prevalence of digital in the audio chain. Receivers are typically made by large companies with the resources to take on digital engineering and do it right. Getting it right in digital in a mass produced product does not cost nearly as much as it does in analog.
Conversely, the smaller high end companies are typically well grounded in the analog domain and making the switch to, or integrating digital research and engineering into their operations is virtually impossible on an economic basis. I don’t know how much it cost Texas Instruments to develop their digital amp chips but it was plenty. Donald Trump could probably retire on it. Other chip companies have spent upwards of $30 million with no marketable result.
The Panasonic receivers use the TI chipset resulting in the sound quality/price ratio we have been trumpeting for the past few years. Once the chipset has been developed, it still takes a major player (Panasonic/Matsushita with over 250,000 employees) to incorporate a complete digital product offering.
Other large companies such as Sony and Yamaha now have digital amp receivers with digital chipsets of their own, or Tripath or other makers. The net effect is to give them a big boost in closing the huge gap in sound quality between themselves and the best of the separate component manufacturers. Pioneer has chosen to stay with analog amps and upped it’s game by sensing the temperature of each output transistor and adjusting the bias accordingly.
Besides the fidelity of the basic signal, the other fast developing area of interest for audiophiles is room correction. Taking the major room problems out of the equation is a huge step forward for overall audio performance. There has usually been a price to pay for this in terms of transparency in the past but with each new implementation, this seems to fade more into the distance.
Good room correction has been very expensive to do. Meridian, Tact, DEQX and Rives are about it for the high end and going with any of these equipment makers will add many thousands of dollars on to the total cost of your system. For those who could afford the cost and tolerate the complexity though it has been worth it.
The technology of proper room correction is expensive to develop but again cheaper and cheaper to implement on mass market products and here we see the major audio companies starting to gain ground.
Several years ago we had the Pioneer 47 receiver which had 5 bands of auto calibrating eq built in. The results were impressive but the overall effect was short of audiophile expectations in the $5000 price bracket. Now we have the Pioneer 84 with vastly more sophisticated room correction at $1500. Different story.
Although we might prefer the amp sections of the Panasonic XR55 or 57 on their own, the Pioneer 84 will produce a very balanced result that begins to smack of “music” in most rooms. That is because most rooms have enough problems to make good room correction a very substantial benefit. Forced to chose between the incredible resolution of the Panasonics or the balance and naturalness of the room taming Pioneer, audiophiles would probably be split down the middle.
Small note. The greatest benefits of room correction have always been in small to medium sized rooms. In very large rooms or rooms with large openings, any room correction system has increasing trouble with the increasingly long reverberation times. This is the case with most systems but the Pioneer does address this in their system - allowing for time sensitivity to be varied.
Yamaha is another company to take a strong lead in dealing with room problems with their YPAO 7 band room correction system. We haven’t evaluated it but would expect it to be excellent.
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