I’ve owned the Onkyo TX-NR414 AV receiver for a year now, and thought I’d branch out the subject matter of this blog a bit with a product review of it. My comments come more from a feature perspective than an audio clarity standpoint, because I’ve pretty thoroughly exercised its feature set, but am not a certified audiophile. What I will say in terms of audio quality is that it delivers if you are someone who can appreciate the sound of an above-average system (average being one of those $250 department store surround-in-a-box kits.) I’ve got it connected to two Bose 301’s for front speakers and two wall-mounted Bose 161s for surround; this configuration produces clear and undistorted audio up through volumes that doubtless disrupt the neighbors.
The features, on the other hand…
Pros:
- It attempts to implement a lot of features. Many look good on paper, but I’m not listing the flaky ones in this category.
- Supports power on/off commands over the network. This feature works reliably. (Through the mobile app; I did a quick trial of standard WOL unsuccessfully.)
- Wealth of surround calibration and configuration options to support most any speaker configuration (including no front center, as in my case.) Easy to fine tune levels and delays.
- Has comprehensive and searchable shoutcast/icecast-basd internet radio listing; integrates with other online music services that I haven’t tested it with.
- Internal microcontroller never freezes, crashes, or otherwise totally spazzes out so bad that it needs a power cycle.
- It supposedly has better DACs than you’d find on PC motherboards etc; I like to take them at their word when listening to lossless audio with my eyes shut in a darkened room, though in reality I doubt I’d actually notice the difference.
Cons:
- HDMI pass-through ports lose some visual fidelity. This isn’t really noticeable with anything less detailed than text from a PC or 1080p device generating text around 12pt. I’m not sure if its running some image processing algorithm or what, but it almost looks like it’s anti-aliasing the text - the text’s color influences the color of the adjacent pixels a bit. This doesn’t happen if I connect the devices directly to my TV.
- It attempts to support HDMI-CEC to control the power of the TV and change inputs, volume etc based on actions taken by connected HDMI devices. This could be done much more intelligently. It works well enough for TV/video watching that I leave it enabled. Turn on the TV, and odds are the TX-NR414 will automatically power up, switch to the TV input, and command the TV to mute its internal speakers. I say “odds are” because it doesn’t always power the receiver up…no rationale I’ve identified as to when it does/doesn’t work. However, it proves to be downright frustrating when I want to listen to music. A typical scenario might go something like this:
- I’d like to listen to the radio. I turn on the receiver, which was last used with the TV and is on TV input. I immediately switch inputs to FM. But, the receiver already commanded the TV to power up. As with all TVs nowadays, this isn’t an instantaneous process; my TV comes up maybe 6 seconds later. Presently, the TV commands the receiver back from FM onto TV input. I now have a TV powered up and pulling ~500 watts and am no longer listening to the radio. I manually switch back to FM. Everything’s now fine. Then I turn the TV off. The TV commands the receiver to power off. Arg.
- In a similar scenario, I’d like to listen to music via a CIFS share on my home network, selecting songs via the Android app. (Yes, with much pulling of hair, you can stream music straight off windows file shares and/or samba. Most every audio codec is supported - it’s about the only device I know of that doesn’t run Windows but does play WMA-Lossless. But everything else is too rudimentary/buggy for this to make the pros category.) I tell my phone to switch the receiver to the “net” input, which immediately powers on the TV - totally unnecessary since I’m browsing the music on my phone.
- Audio files from CIFS shares aren’t searchable or even sortable, and are listed on the Android app by the song’s title in the file’s metadata. My samba server feeds it the files in approximately alphabetical order by artist, so I have thousands of apparently unordered song titles listed on my phone to scroll through. I know my music collection well enough to generally figure out which artists go with which songs and determine where in the list I am, but it’s way trickier to find a song than it should be.
- Since the last firmware update, there seems to be a bug when selecting either a CIFS or DLNA server to connect to via the android app. You tap the server to connect to and it never connects to it - you must hit enter either on the infrared remote or physically on the receiver to proceed.
- Infrequent firmware updates to improve on any of the above issues. Firmware updates that do occur sometimes drop all user data (radio presets, input names, surround config, network bookmarks, …) without warning.
Uber-geeks might be interested to know that nmap says it’s running AXIS Linux 2.6, and that it has a basic web interface served by lighttpd, allowing configuration of network settings and input of favorite internet radio stations.
So, it handles all the absolute necessities of a modern surround receiver. It’s good enough that I don’t foresee springing for any “upgrades” until it fails. But, all the less critical frills like the Android app, home media streaming, HDMI passthrough and HDMI-CEC aren’t totally ironed out.
Addendum, Nov. 2014: The receiver stopped working last month, five months out of warranty. I was heading out the door to the repair shop when I thought I better check Google quick for anything first. Onkyo had launched a special service program for the particular failure I was experiencing just two days before. They required repair to be completed at a central shop of theirs, but sent me a box and packing materials, paid for shipping both ways, and repaired the unit at no cost. Looks like the new component they put in also cleaned up the HDMI quality issues. Overall, this experience had the desired effect on my customer loyalty for the brand.