Buy one while you still can.
Written: Jan 16 '03
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
|
|
| Durability: |
|
|
|
Pros: Price, sound quality.
Cons: A little old-fashioned
The Bottom Line: My advice is to buy one before they run out! Few bells and whistles, but forgo these fripperies and you will be rewarded by a truly superb sound.
|
|
|
| sigismund's Full Review: Nakamichi AV-10 5.1 Channels Receiver |
A couple of Christmas's ago I persuaded my family to all chip in so that we could buy my brother a Sony STR-DB930 a/v receiver. From the moment I heard the lobby scene from The Matrix I knew I had to one day own something similar.
And so my search began. At first I read about the Sony STR-DB1070. Although some reviewed it highly, most described it as "sharp, harsh, and fatiguing".....not what I wanted. My shortlist contained the Marantz SR6200, Yamaha DSPAX630 and the Denon 1802. Then I noticed a Richer Sounds ad. in a What Hi-Fi mag. They were selling a basic setup of an Aiwa A/V receiver and a set of Gale 5.0 speakers for £170.00, (about $273.00) but this could be upgraded, so, after scouring the web for reviews, I paid an extra £70.00 ($112.00) for a set of Eltax Liberty 5 speakers and an extra £240.00 ($385.00) for a Nakamichi AV10 receiver. To this I added an Eltax Atomic 15R sub. at a cost of £175.00....total £655.00 ($1050.00).
So after approx. two months of almost constant listening am I happy? On the whole , yes. The first quirk of this receiver to mildly bug me was the speaker settings in stereo mode. The default setting, which cannot be changed, is to have the front speakers set to Large, but this forces the sub setting to off. The alternative was to set the fronts to small which forces the sub to YES. The Eltax err on the side of being "bright" or trebly and setting them to small only made things worse. At first I got around this by using the Natural DSP mode, which uses the front speakers along with the rears to warm the sound significantly. However, I prefer my music straight, and I wasn't happy with this surround method. I then had the bright idea of setting the rears to None on the Nak so that all music emanated from the fronts and to my surprise it worked, straight stereo, with front speakers set to large and the sub set to YES.
However this Natural DSP mod seemed to "muddy" things when all music was coming from the fronts, and was definately less HI-FI. So back to square one, with fantastic movie sound, but slightly too bright in stereo. I considered buying new speakers. But then I re-visited the web review page of the Nak. I hadn't wanted to play with the loudness button as it increases the bass by 8db, but at the expense of a 6db increase in treble and this made things too bright according to the reviewer. But that was with movies. I tried it with music, and with a little tweaking from the separate bass and treble controls it sounded much warmer. And when I want to watch a movie I simply turn off loudness and press the tone button to bypass the bass and treble settings without having to reset them every time I go back to music.
The only other negatives are a lack of inputs, if that matters to you, and no Dolby Digital Ex or DTS EX and no Dolby Pro Logic II, which is what I meant when I said it was a little old fashioned. Other than that the Nak is a SUPERB performer, with both movies.......distinct sounds, bassy, sharp, energetic.....and music (when set up properly) and supported by a weighty set of speakers.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 450.00
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
sigismund
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.