AWESOME UPGRADE!!!

 

I finally decided to upgrade my preamp, as I was running with a Sherbourn PT-7000, that sounded great, however, had no HDMI inputs and none of the recent CODECS for lossless compression.

I looked at Marantz's flagship, Denon's top of the line pre/pro and several other pre/pro's in the $3K+ price arena and was consistently drawn to the Onkyo PR-SC886 and the Integra 9.9, which are in fact the same unit with different exteriors.  I was about to purchase the Onkyo from Outlaw Audio ($1,495) when I heard talk on a blog site about Onkyo selling "refurbished" units for $1,000.  I placed my order with Onkyo, and had it 3 days later, shipped from California to Wisconsin.  Onkyo even picked up the shipping cost, and knocked a little off the price for joining Club Onkyo.  I doubt the unit was actually refurbished, as it looks like it was never out of the box or repackaged.  Standard warranty is 3 years, refurbished units come with one year and an additional year can be purchased for $85, well worth it considering a discount for joining Club Onkyo and getting free shipping.  (Shipping from Outlaw was $40 and the discount for joining Club Onkyo was $10.)

This pre/pro is exceptionally well built as far as I can tell and supports all of the current CODECs people are interested in related to Blu-Ray playback.  The remote is laid out well.  The back panel is also laid out well, however, the manual is tough to use if you are like me and at the age where you are trying not to admit that you need reading glasses.  That said, the manual forced me to buy reading glasses, and even after, I referred to the PDF version on my computer so I could "blow it up".  The manual is difficult. There are a lot of interactions between different settings that are not evident or addressed properly.  Be prepared to spend the better part of a day if you have a complex multi-zone setup as I do.  I also had issues programming macros when it came to incorporating setup functions within the macros themselves.  What I am getting at is that on the remote there is no single button to switch your HDMI output from HDMI main to HDMI sub.  There is an HDMI button on the front of the unit under the drop down door that toggles between HDMI outputs, but not on the remote.  You have to go in to the setup menu to select the HDMI output if using the remote.   This is a minor inconvenience for me and a major one for my wife, so I skipped the macro and told her to push the button on the front of the system...problem solved...I hope.  I hope there will be an upgrade path for the firmware.  I have noticed a couple of inconsistencies that have been rectified by cycling power to the unit.  Onkyo Professional is unfortunately slow to respond to email inquiries, that is, if they in fact do respond at all.  I sent 3 emails and the only response I got to one of them was to reset the system. Without better info than that, there was no way I was going to create another 4 hours of work for a problem I had once in a month that went away after power cycling.  

This pre/pro, as well as the Integra equivalent do not stream network radio or have the ability to access a DNLA enabled drive or access your PC's Windows media player to stream files.  Onkyo and Integra incorporate this feature in to several of their receiver's, but no their Pro series pre-amps.  That is the only big feature difference between the Onkyo and competitive systems I looked at.

There are a few bugs that I am not that worried about, at least in the short run.  I would have liked the ability to stream files from my computer, however, my PS3 can do that anyway, and most of the newer Blu-Ray players can do that too.  The sound quality is stunning as it really breathed new life in to my system and frankly got me interested in home theater audio again.  Running 2 Adcom amps, 5 channels (200Watts/channel) to B&W speakers & 1 B&W sub for Home Theater, fixed 120" screen with Epson 1080P UB projector, PS3, U-Verse and a Pioneer Universal DVD player with SACD and DVD-Audio support, zone 2 with Parasound stereo amp (100 Watts/channel), Totem Acoustic speakers, Toshiba HD TV (HDMI to DVI) and a Velodyne sub.

In summary...the trade offs were worth the $1,500 to $2,200 I saved versus the other pre/pro's I looked at in the same class as this Onkyo system and had I paid $400 more at Outlaw, the trade offs would have still been very worthwhile.  The sound quality is stunning.  My system is much simpler to use.

This was a big success, in my book.