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Originally Posted by Man-Fai Wong
Haha... Thanks much, Brent, for that thorough comparison. I swear though that you must be trying to sway me back over to the Onkyo 805.  
_Man_ |
Obviously, I don't care how you spend your money.
But I did just go through a similar mental excercise (including the time taken to finally make a decision) a few months ago. I was looking for a replacement for a Sherwood-Newcastle AVP-9080 in use since the dark ages of 1998...it still has an AC3 RF input for DD from laserdisc. Anyway, a friend of mine made the same upgrade from a 9080 to a 661 as a prepro and loved it, so it made the short list. Then the Onkyo 705 came along for around $100ish more than the 661...extra HDMI input, native lossless decoding, THX processing, etc. Waffle, waffle. Suddenly, look at that...the 805's down to $699 consistently, only $120ish more than the 705. Doesn't offer me a whole lot more as a preamp than the 705 except the Burr-Browns (I don't care about multizone), but using two of those onboard Ultra certified amps to expand to 7.1 one day would be a better match for my existing amps...or so the mental justification went (my 5 channel Adcom is THX Ultra as is my NAD 2 channel used as a subwoofer amp). I actually saw the 705 drop to $535 one Saturday night in January and planned to buy at that price, but wanted to run it by my wife first...was back up to $620s the next morning and never dropped below upper $500s over the next few weeks so I talked to the wife a bit more and then ordered the 805.
-Brent