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Comment by supernovae | Hacker News Reader

I switched to sonos and never looked back. I had a lot of Onkyo over the years and it always felt like they should have gone the software route much sooner.

ultimately i think smart tvs and roku were a bigger part of the receiver demise - it just didn’t fit the receiver mindset and the experience sucked

sonos wasn’t cheap but i’m on year 7 and it still works and i only saw one product refresh on soundbar but my old one still works - just sticking to spdiff. with 7 years of onkyo i would have been on 2nd or 3rd receiver just trying to stay ahead of dvd to bd and hdmi 1.x to 2.x and evrything between.

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The convenience / sound quality balance has shifted because things like Sonos are very convenient, even though the sound quality has, if anything, gone down for the price. Certainly the convenience of streaming has curtailed the AVR market, since streaming has shit audio.

But SPDIF is limiting you to DD at best which is 640kbit/s IIRC. Steaming services are often DD+ which won't go over SPDIF. I've got discs, so looking at 18Mbit/s on some soundtracks. My $600 Yamaha amp was absolutely better than an SPDIF setup.

I never bought a single BD after wasting so much money on VHS and DVD collections and for streaming audio/video it works great. Eventually I'll go HDMI with CEC but the speaker will remain on another tv because it sounds so damn good.

> But SPDIF is limiting you to DD at best which is 640kbit/s IIRC. Steaming services are often DD+ which won't go over SPDIF.

Yeah, but an Apple TV or HTPC or w/e can transcode your DD+ media to DD in realtime.

(And current Sonos products support HDMI.)

>Yeah, but an Apple TV or HTPC or w/e can transcode your DD+ media to DD in realtime.

Sure. But that means tanking the quality. It doesn't magically keep the quality just because it started as DD+.

>(And current Sonos products support HDMI.)

Which is why I was making the point about going the SPDIF route.

> Sure. But that means tanking the quality. It doesn't magically keep the quality just because it started as DD+.

I'd say "marginally degrade" rather than tank. DD at 640 kbps is pretty close to transparent, and E-AC-3 to AC-3 transcoding uses hybrid recompression to avoid the full quality hit of lossless -> lossless.

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