15 out of 15 people found this review helpful.
Good - but with some limitations
Date of Review: Sep 29, 2004
The Bottom Line: Great Sound ! Best solution for playing compressed music on a main AV system, but watch out for zone 2 limitations.
I've put up with mid-priced audio for years, and when I bought a new house with a nice big media area in the family room, and hi-tech wiring I decided it was time to upgrade to soemthing a little higher end.
Let me start by saying that I'm not a serious audiophile. What I was looking for was something that would give a good HT experience and provide decent music quality in a family room. I had put together an HTPC that I planned to use to feed CD, DVD and MP3/WMA digitally to my AV system. However, my wife hated the HTPC, so I had to find a plan B !
The reason I bought the NR801 was primarily the NetTune feature. The NR801 has an ethernet connection that lets you hook it up to a network (wired - no WiFi capability) and stream digital music from a PC on the network - that is NetTune. You can also connect to Internet radio stations, but I haven't tried that yet.
The other thing that attracted me to the NR801 was the ability to drive a 2nd zone along with 5.1 in "zone 1" as an alternative to a single 7.1 configuration. I am happy enough with 5.1, and have speakers in the living and dining rooms wired back to the family room media bay, and I figured that I could have background music streaming via NetTune to those rooms all day long. That was my first mistake, but more about that later.....
My current setup is an Optoma RD50 DLP RPTV (review elsewhere on this site), ReplayTV, Middle of the road DVD player, Digital Cable STB, and a Playstation 2. Speakers are 4 Klipsh SCR3s in the ceiling, with an AudioSource center speaker and SubWoofer from an old 5.1 speaker system (the latter needing replacing with something better....).
The ReplayTV and DVD player video feeds are component into the NR801, fed on into the TV. I also have S-VHS from the NR801 to the TV because the NR801 OSD doesn't support component. On the audio side, both the Replay TV and DVD player connect to the NR801 over optical cables. The PS2 connects via S-VHS and analog audio, and the cable box connects to the ReplayTV the same way, which is the real weak link in the setup as far as TV is concerned. And of course there the network connection to my PC, which as 4-500 albums in 128kbps WMA.
On the video side, the NR801 appears to switch all the inputs without any noticable signal degradation (I compared direct wire vs switched) - you can't ask for more !
On the audio side I'll start with the NetTune - which the only good reason to buy this rather than a lower-priced similar spec Onkyo receiver without this feature...
For comparision, I tried playing ac ouple of albums in the DVD player, and via NetTune in all of MP3, WMA (both 128kbps) and PCM. I chose some Beathoven piano sonatas, and Oasis/Be Here Now for the test. For this test I used the "Stereo" mode of the NR801 (more on the modes later) - which is the 2 front speakers plus the Sub. The CD sound was great - some minor SubWoofer issues which I am putting down to the cheap sub (I'll update this review when I have a decent sub0. As I mentioned, I'm not a big audiophile, so I can't say more than that the music sounded great - certainly a lot better than with my old Pioneer D509, which gets (got ?) reasonable reviews. PCM from the PC was indistinguishable, so the network connection clearly doesn't introduce any losses - even when downloading a file over the web using the same PC at the same time. Next up was WMA; I have to say, I was really impressed ! I could tell the difference if I really tried, but you really had to listen for it, and I'm not convinced I'd spot the difference 10/10 in a blind test. Then on to MP3; here I really could tell the difference. That's not to say that the MP3s were bad - very listenable, but there was a noticable loss of definition. Conclusion - love 'em or hate 'em, Microsoft do a better job.
Then came the big disappointment ! I wanted to set up the NetTune to play the WMAs to the living/dining rooms on zone 2 - and it wouldn't let me ! 5 minutes of scouring the (lengthy) manual revealed that zone 2 only supports analog inputs. If I'd payed closer to reatil for the NR801 I would probably have sent it back at that point - but at $500 I figure its still a reasonable deal.
Back to NetTune.....The user interface is much more intuitive than I would have thought possible. When using the TV OSD its a snip - navigate up and down through artists, albums, playlists. However, as I have a DLP, I don't want to waste bulb life by having the TV on when I'm playing music, so I tried using the NR801's 1-line display, without much hope of it being easy - but I was wrong ! After a couple of minutes I had the hang of it, and was happily zipping through my ~5000 WMAs, finding the song I wanted in a few seconds. This really was a nice surpise; of course it plays albums and playlists OK, but it will also just keep going through an artist one track after another - in my case hours of Chopin without touching a button after I'd selected the first track !
Next, on to the Remote. I have a Harmony remote, so I'll be putting the Onkyo remote aside as soon as I have gotten the harmony programmed....but that can be time consuming, so I'm using the NR801 remore for now. Programming the remote for the DVD player, cable box and TV was fairly straightforward. It only had preprogrammed codes for the DVD player, but it learnt the TV and cable box codes button by button without difficulty. Unfortuantely, I could not get it to learn the ReplayTV codes accurately. I've had the same problem with other Universals, so I figure that the ReplayTV remote does something unusual - the Harmony is the only universal I have found that willhandle it - and if you pay $200 for a remote, you expect it to be able to handle _anything_.
One slight annoyance with the NR801 is that apart from DVD, the other AV inputs are just "Video 1", "Video 2", etc, not "TV", "VCR", etc. Doesn't bother me - I can remember that the TV is on "Video 4" - but the wife and kids feel otherwise !
I'll mention a few of the playback/speaker modes, as they are not obvious from the spec sheet, and are a step up from what I'm used to. "Direct" plays just on the front speakers, as you expect - Sub is Off. Stereo adds the sub; nothing unusal there either - but "All Stereo" does a good job of playing through all the 5.1 speakers and filling the room (did I mention that the family room is 20' x 20' and open to a 20'x20' kitchen) without introducing any annoying echos the way the DSP modes do. Then there's all the DTS, THX, Dolby, etc stuff - which you can see from the spec sheet.
Finally, there's the overall movie experience. "Perfect Storm" is the most theater-like DVD I've got, but unfortunately is scratched, so the best test I have is Pirates of The Carribean set to DTS. After watching a few of the action scenes, I went in and pumped up the rear speakers a little, and then watched the whole movie. The overall experience was terrific - just can't wait to try Perfect Storm when I buy another copy.
I bought my NR801 from PCMall for $500 refurbished (12 month warranty), and at that price I'm happy even though I can't play the WMAs in zone 2. Although its a refurb, its blemishless - could have been new !
So I think that covers everything - I'll not bore you with the specs - you can read them from the spec sheet.
One final thing before I conclude; I was in 2 minds about whether to by Onkyo because of the _very_ heavy handed way they try to restrict what people say about Onkyo gear sold on eBay. As far as I can see a lot of eBay listing get removed without good reason - presumably because Onkyo threaten suit against eBay. This goes way beyond protecting the brand - IMO its tantamount to price fixing. They go well beyond what is reasonable, and seem to me to be trying to prevent discounting, or selling by other than authorized distributors. As a consumer, I don't like companies that resort to this to keep prices high - it may be in their interests, but it sure isn't in mine. Worth thinking about before you pay $7-800 for a new unit......
Conclusion then - I haven't seen a network media player with optical or SPDIF output at a sensible price, and I just don't believe that the DACs in the cheaper units are even close to the Onkyo's - and even if they were there'd still be analog loss in the connections. So, if you want to play WMAs (or MP3s - though as noted above I reccomend going WMA) through your main audio system, the NR801 is as good as you are going to get at a sensible price for both network media player and receiver - whether in 1 box or 2.
If you want to do the WMA thing, I recommend the NR801. If not, I expect that you could get a non-networked unit of similar quality at a better price. Just remember, zone 2 is from analog inputs only !
