New Amp Needed For Living Room

AndyCr15 · 1 Mar 2020 at 09:22

I currently have a Samsung AV-R610 AV Surround Receiver in the living room. I would guess it's at least 10 years old and has now started making some pretty odd noises when you turn the volume up. It may actually be as simple as a fan needing replacing, but I'm thinking it might be easier/better at this point to replace it.

I'm wondering what my options are. I have a (I think) 5.1 speaker setup and I was wondering what new advancements there might be. Can I get one with BlueTooth? Better still, maybe one that has Google casting ability so I can use it like a Google Home in my home group for if playing music to the entire flat?

I guess my budget is £100-£200, but please say if spending a little more will really pay off.

Thanks

hornetstinger · 1 Mar 2020 at 12:05

Personally I recommend Yamaha avr. They don't offer the best power output but they are solid reliable units.

As for Bluetooth personally don't care as lower quality sound, and casting and voice control doesn't interest me.

The issue is your 5.1 speaker set may not be compatible with a regular avr, if your speakers are proprietary designed with a htib. Say they're 4 ohm speakers have unique crossover set in a htib, and subwoofer is passive

lucid · 1 Mar 2020 at 16:00

@AndyCr15 , £100-£200 is pretty-much the bottom end of the price range for what was the DVD/Blu-ray home surround system market. I say was because that market is vanishing fast. The trend towards soundbars, combined with the general shift away from playing discs to streaming, means that there's no real demand any more for a disc player/amp with 5x wired satellite speakers and a sub. Three or four years ago you'd have been able to choose from perhaps a dozen different models in a round-up from Samsung, LG, Sony, Panasonic and probably a few others, that's not the case today.

Your Samsung AV-R610 (introduced in 2006) doesn't quite fit the same mould. It's a basic AV receiver with a couple of digital inputs and a bunch of stereo RCA connections, but in essence the amplification and speakers are lifted from the all-in-one surround systems that Samsung used to do as a main line.

Whatever the history, the reality today is the £100 - £200, or even £300, is going to put you pretty-firmly in sound bar / sound base territory.

You'll get some toys at the upper-end of your budget. BT certainly, internet radio streaming probably - but check whether it's wireless or wired. NFC is a possibility.

Alexa integration is more common than Google's Chromecast, so if casting is important to you, look at buying a sound bar with either an AUX audio in or a HDMI input and add the appropriate Google Chromecast device. Where your TV has a spare HDMI in, you could connect through it to the soundbar too, though you would need the TV on in most cases to be able to pass sound through it.

I'm not going to make any specific sound bar / sound base recommendations because I don't know if that's something you'd even consider. All I would do is point you towards retailers who stock products based on quality rather than simply price point. Richer Sounds and John Lewis are good first port-of-calls.

£300 will just about squeeze you on to the entry-level step of a proper AV receiver + speaker kit with 4K pass-through and HD audio decoding. What you gain in quality, upgradeability and flexibility though you'll lose in toys. Have a look at the Yamaha YHT1840.

AndyCr15 · 1 Mar 2020 at 19:52

Thanks, some good points. Tbh, a soundbar would be fine I guess. The only thing I would want, we have a PC (file server) in the living room, that occassionally we use to play things on the TV (one of the TV inputs is a PC output/2nd monitor) and we can switch to the PC's sound using the amp at the moment. I guess I would just need a soundbar with a few inputs.

John Lewis is a good option too as I get discount there. Thanks, will take a look at what they have.

dowie · 1 Mar 2020 at 21:34

You could look at second hand/refurbished/ex display etc.. get something perhaps a couple of years old. I mean if you've already got a set of speakers and are on a budget that that would perhaps be more efficient.

Also if you decided you didn't want new features re: google home etc.. then there are loads of amps out there that are perfectly fine for a low cost 5.1 set up.

lucid · 2 Mar 2020 at 03:22

dowie said:
You could look at second hand/refurbished/ex display etc.. get something perhaps a couple of years old. I mean if you've already got a set of speakers and are on a budget that that would perhaps be more efficient.

Also if you decided you didn't want new features re: google home etc.. then there are loads of amps out there that are perfectly fine for a low cost 5.1 set up.

He'd be better off starting from scratch rather than trying to re-use those Samsung speakers.

For a start, the sub is passive. It's basically a loudspeaker in a box, which is only suitable for another AV-R610 or a very small number of AV receivers with the speaker socket outputs for passive subs.

Then, as @hornetstinger said, you have the problem of impedance.

The Samsung amp and speakers (all of them) are 4 Ohms. It's not the end of the world; a bit of caution with the volume control could see someone scrape by. The problem is what happens if someone forgets? Speakers have a nominal impedance, but also see the resistance peak and drop with frequency. An 8 Ohm speaker can dip to just 2 Ohms for certain frequnecies, and the closer the resistance gets to 0 Ohms then the more the speaker looks like a short across the amp's speaker terminals. Add a bit of enthusiastic application of the volume dial.... That's when amps go "ping" and the little puff of magic smoke spirals towards the ceiling.

An amp and speaker package with an active sub makes more sense as a used purchase. Pioneer, Yamaha, Denon are all reasonably s/h safe AV receiver buys. Couple them to some Canton, Wharfedale, Tannoy, Mordaunt Short speakers and you'd have a nice little system that would handle the HD audio formats and maybe ARC from the TV too for around £150. There'd be enough inputs for other sources including a Chromecast Audio.

dowie · 2 Mar 2020 at 09:04

Ah OP didn’t mention anything about Samsung speakers etc.. I guess that’s implied by the model/make of the old receiver he has?

I just read it as he had an old amp/receiver to replace and also has some speakers... Obvs if there are a set and they are not compatible then meh...

I still think it’s worth him checking gumtree etc.. plenty of speakers and 5.1 receivers out there.

lucid · 2 Mar 2020 at 11:48

I agree about s/h. There are enough pre-ATMOS receivers around so long as the OP knows what to look for. He might need some help with that though.

Speakers to go with it are coming on to the used market as people move to soundbars. This won't last forever though, so now is a good time to buy while stock is reasonably pleniful and prices are favourable. I doubt there'll be as much choice in two years time.

Coming back to what he has now, I'm only taking an educated guess at the Samsung speakers. Maybe they're someone else's kit with a passive sub? The thing is though, I can't recall any of the main brands actively marketing a standalone speaker package with a passive sub. The market for such a kit would be (and is still) too niche. Conventional HTIB systems work best with the speakers they're designed for because they usually lack the facility to accommodate crossover adjustments. Add to that, any sort of better-sounding speakers might well show up the limitations of a typical player/amp in a HTIB kit, so why bother?

Yamaha, Pioneer, and Onkyo all used to offer budget receiver/speaker packages for £200-£250; some of those were based on a passive sub but the AV receiver also had an output to drive an active sub if the owner chose to upgrade later. The speaker kit never had much value s/h though because it wasn't much use outside of the package it came with.

The manual for the Samsung receiver is available on the 'net. I can see that it has an almost-full set of speaker set-up controls: Speaker size (small/lrg), crossover frequency and distance are all there. I can't recall seeing phase though. But without a ready supply of aftermarket speaker kits, what good is all that?

I could be wrong, but to me, the only way that the AV-R610 makes sense is if it was sold with a matching speaker kit, and the most likely source for that would be Samsung themselves.

I can see the appeal of it as a package though. Typical HTIB kits of the time were crap for connectivity. That was a big plus of the Yam', Pio', Onk' kits, but not everyone wanted a full height AV receiver under the telly. Slimline AV receivers such as the Marantz NR-range weren't available back then IIRC. The AV-R610 (+ spealers) would have been a useful half-way-house solution.
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