DON'T SPEND $1000 ON A RECEIVER!
Look at the AVR55! Simply awesome. And the price! I've had my HK AVR55 for six months now, and I love it.. It's done something that no other peice of equiptment has ever done for me. It's made me not want to shop for a replacement. I can't imagine spending another penny on receivers or amplifiers. It will be quite some time before the industry adds enough bells and whistles to get me to justify replacing this fine peice of equiptment.

I shopped for months, looking at all of the usual consumer stuff because I didn't think I could afford anything that would make me happy. I bought three other receivers and returned them for various reasons. I didn't think I could be satisfied untill I decided to spend the $100 more for the HK. (I paid $500 for mine last year.)

If you're in the market for a top notch receiver, I'm convinced there's not a better value on the market.

"You can pay more, but you can't get more."

I have spent months doing research on receivers. After comparing products specs and finding out true specs through lab results, most receivers do not perform to their specs!! H/K and some others using high current amplifiers are the only ones that perform to spec. This receiver sounds excellent and at $400 I couldn't go wrong!! However, it does lack upgrade ability and the DSP modes don't sound that great. Many people complain about the remote, but any learning remote that I have seen never looks pretty, it works just fine for me, I am glad that it is at least a learning remote vice a universal remote. An outstanding deal for the quality of the product

I just purchased the HK AVR 55 and have had it hooked up for one day. I am presently listening to Fleetwood Mac the Dance on DVD and am in love. The HK is clean and drives my Klipsch KLF20's beautifully. I did not get as good a price as others ($550) but bought from a local dealer who I have trust in. Worth a few extra bucks I suppose. My only concern is the 55 has no upgradeability; hope this does not cause a problem. The 5.1 sounds great and music CDs sound outstanding. A few quirks that are not big problems are 1) the volume control is weird, does not have a stop just turns and turns 2) when I turn on the HK there is a slight pop on my speakers; don't like this. Is this a defect or do others experience this. 3) the remote is cheap but I bought the receiver for great sound and apparently I am getting that. I am still searching through the different features but find the lack of remote speakers a bit odd. However, this thing must be built like a brick; so heavy i thought I would have to add support to the shelf. I bought the 55 instead of the present model line because I was scared off with reviews on the 35 and 65. Seems to have some problems. But, fantastic sound and that is what it is all about. A big 5 for this one.

I have this receiver from January 99. The quality really good, best I ever had before. Remote is not the state of the art, but this is not the most important.The reliability is the problem. After 2 weeks it quit totally. Local service doesn't know sh... about this unit. It was 4 times in repair 2-4 weeks each time with no result. Last time I just requested from H/K to change the unit.
The new unit works good so far. They really need to review their local services and solve reliability problems. The product itself excellent. Overall
rating: 4

HK AVR55 is not bad overal, sounds really nice. However, the unit will shut off every 5 minutes if you selected TV and there is no video connection to the tv input. What kind of nonsense design is that?????? Also, the tunner broke 2 weeks after I bought it. I bought AVR25 four years ago, and a month ago the power supply will shut off the unit every now and then. Maybe I just don't have lunk with HK.

tons of ins and outs, great sound.

none.

All i want to add is that by chance i had to deal with 5 different H/K receivers recently, two of which were AVR55's. All of them were sold as "factory serviced" and all of them were in perfect working condition. So even with all this negative rep there is a good chance of getting a good H/K and the sound is just perfect.

Similar Products Used:

Sony, Technics, Onkyo, Denon, other h/k

THIS IS COOL AND AWESOME PRODUCTthumbs up to harman kardon, for the price this is worth it. the sound is so clean that no i wish to upgrade to a soundproofed room. 55watts/ channel is powerful enough for anything and i would recommend this to anyone seachign for a receiver. but let me warn you, the remote.........forget it, guess everyone knows about the remote.

I got my h/k AVR-55 amp 6 months ago.WOW what a nice piece of material.Great price for CANADA $900 inc.tax at A/B SOUND reg.$1500 smacks any place else. Best bang for your buck(like 5.0L mustang). The remote lacks in the class department but the amp makes up for it five times over.

I posted a message on here about 6 months ago, and there have been so many positive feedbacks it rolled mine off! Great Stereo, been a nice
6 months, it has performed flawlessly. Very quit amp, and accurate.. I had a
Pioneer 55XS series.. 100 watts and this 55w Harmon blisters it, the Pioneer was harsh when cranked, but this Harmon stays constant even at ear piercing
DVD movie watching levels. I have been using it with the Contour on, which I
really like especially for movies. Best reciever I have ever owned, my only
complaint is it doesn't have RDS, but I got a Denon TU380 RD tuner to take care of that problem! Another great thing about it is that you can turn off the display while watching a movie!!!.. what a feature, especially watching a movie
in the dark!

Clean power, excellent DD decoding, no noise, pre-amp outputs to all channels!!!

Only 1 digital input, need more S-video inputs and ouputs, RELIABILITY!!!

I have had mine for about a year...paid $400 at Fry's. Up until last week it worked wonderfully. Then IT DIED. No ouput. It basically functioned as a passive pre-amp. I wasn't really able to test the receiver's amplifier power, because I used the pre-outs to all channels. I only used the center channel on the receiver. Why it would die is surprising based on the fact that by using the pre-outs, I was not taxing the amplifiers...especially during DVD playback in 5.1 mode. What's even more strange is that it died when it was OFF. I watched Saving Private Ryan on DVD...SPECTACULAR 5.1 decoding. The following morning listened to Diana Krall...shut off the system...left town. When I returned and powered up to watch a DVD, no decoding, no ambience modes, no LFE output. Wired the speakers to the receiver's outputs to confirm it there was no output..sure enough...no output. Before I took the receiver in for warranty repair a couple of days ago, was still using the receiver as a pre-amp. It was still able to feed the source signal to my outboard amps...you see a passive pre-amp...STRANGE...

So I have give this receiver a high value rating but a lower overall rating due to reliability issues which I did know about until TODAY!!! Sure wish I knew about this before purchasing the AVR55. The only reason I purchased it is because of the pre-amp outputs. I really wanted an Onkyo but the models with pre-amp outs ran at least $900 at the time.