Price, Surround Modes

Crappy Remote,Rear Surround not to strong, Overheating

I found this for a great price at Circuit City, will never but from there again. I run two Acoustic Research loud speakers for music, and use Bose for the surround. The rear channels give static and fade in and out, after replacing RCA's and the VCR, have finally narrowed it down to the reciever. The remote has problems of its own also, the Volume "Up" and "Down" buttons actually stick. Imagine how annoying that can be. When listening to music on CD or Tuner the darn thing cuts out and displays "Protect". This is after only about 15-20 minutes of listening at a little bit more then reasonable level. I have never had any problem with Sony products, in fact I run a complete line of Sony in my car. But I guess the Car and Home Audio side of Sony are drastically different in quality. To resolve this problem I am going to give Sony a second chance and buy the STR-DE835. put it through a good sound check and decide from there. I guess you really do get that you pay for.

Similar Products Used:

Pioneer, Onkyo, Sony

Great sound

None

For the price I paid you can not beat this sound!!!!!
Everyone who comes by to party estimates the cost of the stero at $1000!!!!!!!
Great features and low cost.
Using the Pioneer HTP-305 speakers (also cheap)and it ROCKS!
I took a big chance big chance buying a Sony (I have steadfastly refused to buy a Sony product for 20 years)but they came through on this one!!
Yes,it gets very hot but this does not affect the performance.

Similar Products Used:

Kenwood KR-V8030

cheap, nothing like this at the price level ( literally ).

hiss, high distortion at any sort of decent sound level, hardly any power, sounds pretty poor

Ok... let me start off by saying at this price, this receiver is quite good.. i havent seen any other receiver this cheap before so really, if you want to rate this product by the value of it, it would come in high.. however, at such a cheap price, issues come into this product, as one would expect.

To start with, this unit is best suited to bookshelf type speakers. Its '80 watts' rating is really only about 25 watts continous, maybe 30 if your lucky, and to get a decent sound out of a big speaker with no hiss, its not going to happen with this product. When you turn the volume up to a certain stage, it will produce hiss with no components attached. The rear speakers have too much hiss, more than the fronts and it really is unacceptable. It has a few inputs, but due to no svideo its pretty useless for video related purposes.

So to summarize, this unit hisses a fair bit in stereo mode at decent volume, it hisses too much in rear mode and its pretty weak as far as driving speakers go..it sounds pretty poor too, but... for the price, I dont think there is anything else, its probably the cheapest av receiver around and you cant expect too much from something this cheap..