Onkyo has filed for bankruptcy

Will be interesting to see how this all plays out. I'm not aware that Sharp is known for anything "great".  I never owned Onkyo, but it was nice having them around putting some price pressure on other companies like Pioneer, Sony, Denon, Yamaha, and others. And I knew friends who did have Onkyo tape decks, and receivers who were happy with them. 

I hate to see any audio company fall by the wayside.  It limits the choices of those just now getting in this game. 

 

My experience with Onkyo vs. Anthem was the opposite. It was now several years ago, but I rapidly cycled through an Onkyo and Emotiva until I settled on an Oppo BD player as my processor for several years, a far superior situation. Now I’ve gone to Anthem which is almost as good as the Oppo with more features, and certainly easier to use audio return channel.

All right jjss49, I apologize for popping off.  I usually enjoy your posts, btw.

  I think we should care when a decent midfi company like Onkyo bites the dust.  It’s a sign that the whole industry is struggling.  And the large mid fis usually have the money to develop some technologies that the High End companies can then improve upon.  I personally haven’t bought an Onkyo product for probably a decade, but their demise bothers me

I remember when I was a kid and I was lucky enough in high school to have my own system which I got at Tech Hifi. I had a Philips GA-212 turntable with AT cart, a lower end Sansui receiver and a pair of EPI 120 speakers. I later steam cleaned cookie sheets one winter break to save up the money to go back to Tech Hifi and buy that Technics cassette deck which had the cassette load at a 45 degree angle behind a clear plastic door you slid open and closed. I did very little babysitting when I was a kid. But once my neighbor and parents friend wanted me to come over and watch their two younger boys. Well the father had an Onkyo Quadraphonic receiver! I thought that was especially cool. He also commanded me to not touch it! I think he did play it for me though. Of course it sounded great. That is my most significant Onkyo memory. I never owned an Onkyo piece. But I did own a couple of Integra AV receivers. Though that doesn’t count. But there you go…

  What the heck, we can lump Integra and Onkyo together..  I owned an Integra receiver not long before my last Onkyo receiver and there was no sonic difference, if anything the Onkyo was an improvement and cost about $1K less.

  In fact that raises the interesting question of how audio companies differentiate themselves.  Both Sony and Pioneer wanted the bottom end of the market but then had an “ES” line that cost more and those two letters were like a code for audiophiles, as if to say here is the good stuff, the rest of our line is crap.  Others create separate divisions such as Esoteric and Integra.  Esoteric charges about 20 times more than the equivalent product from their parent company but the build difference is at least obvious to a buyer.  Integra cost two to three times what Onkyo charged and presumably used better parts, but the end product could hardly be differentiated from the best Onkyo offerings