My 32 year old, fifty pound, wondrously analog Denon AVC-3000 receiver finally succumbed to entropy today…
I knew the end would come soon. See, the left channel had been weak on startup for a couple of months, but after 15 minutes or so would balance out with the right channel. So I was just kind of limping it along and hoping I could get to my year-end bonus before it finally gave up the ghost.
No such luck.
Leading up to this I had been looking at options for when the inevitable happened – but the available options tend to start at about $600. And the economy isn’t conducive to buying $600 receivers right now…
The AVC-3000 is from a time before digital, so it does things like switch S-Video and has about a hundred RCA jacks on the back, so getting audio from a modern digital device requires being inventive…
See, I have a 4K Apple TV feeding an old 32-inch computer monitor via HDMI, and then was taking the headphone output of the monitor and converting that into the RCA that the Denon required.
It worked, even if the sound quality out of the D/A in the monitor was a bit lacking.
Anyway, the left channel in the Denon completely failed right before lunch and steadfastly refused to be recussitated.
I was planning to run over to Walgreens for some toiletries and hit up the Burger King in the parking lot during lunch, and there’s a pawn shop that shares the parking lot – so I decided to drop in and see if there was anything that I could replace the Denon with that didn’t cost a thousand dollars.
And I returned home with a really good condition Onkyo TX-SR353 that ran me $90.
It came with everything; antennas, remote, manual, HDMI cable, etc. And, as an added bonus, it understands 4K HDR – so I can run HDMI from the Apple TV to it, and then HDMI from it to the monitor – so the audio sounds really good now.
Now my enormous 30 year old Bowers & Wilkins DM640 speakers do a wonderful job of illustrating the weakness of lesser hardware, and the Onkyo is a bit ‘brash’, but it beats only having one channel.
And it was $90…
Listening to "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood