On research it does seem the Sound United have significant issues with their receivers.
Now I find Amazon generally a good place to asses reliability.
6% had total failure like you in short order, with one respondent having the replacement promptly fail. A full 16% found the receiver buggy with numerous soft ware issue.
So among that group 21% found the receiver unacceptable. Some were kind giving 4 stars when the faults in my view justified a much lower rating.
Many noted that the unit got very hot if played loud. I suspect this is related to ventilation.
This is totally unacceptable performance in units that cost north of $1000.00
I have been concerned about the layout of receivers and the number of amps for a long time.
Personally my best advice is to avoid receivers if at all possible. If you do buy a receiver then get one with preouts, and use external power amps to power the front three. I think that will a long way to increasing longevity and protecting your investment. I think with current layouts, external fans are mandatory.
Interesting idea but I think such products may be getting a little too complicated for the Amazon ratings to be too meaningful because:
- we don't know if the owners have their units long enough to discover the real bugs.
- many may think their units are buggy when in fact in many cases it could have been operator's errors, or settings related.
- sample size are generally not big enough, not too bad for AVRs but you won't find too many for AVPs
If you do want to use Amazon to assess, then be fair, don't just look at one particular model. So let's take a look of a few AVRs and AVPs as follow:
AVRs:
AVR-X1600H (292 reviews)
5 star............78%
4 star............13%
3 star............ 4%
2 star............. 2%
1 star............. 4%
The AVR-X6700H (241 reviews) has similar results:
5 star............ 80%
4 star............ 11%
1 star ........... 5%
AVPs:
AV7706 (only 10 reviews)
5 star..............62%
4 star............. 33%
1 star ............ 5%
AV8805 (only 14 reviews)
Price: $4499 (Crutchield)
5 star ........... 83%
1 star ........... 17%
May as well look at the $4,000 Monolith HTP-1 as I can't found any for Yamaha"s. There are only 6 reviews for the HTP-1:
5 Star............ 54%
1 star.............13%
So again, interesting idea, but I think those Amazon ratings are not indicative of the brands/products long term reliability. If the sample size are big, like the AVR-X1600H's then may be okay to some extents, otherwise anecdotal at best.
By the way, I couldn't find any Amazon reviews on the AVR-X3600H, was it Amazon somewhere in Europe?
Amazon UK does have 8 reviews on the unit and the results were great:
5 star...............90%
4 star.............. 10%,
but only 8 reviews so that is not a reliable indicator of reliability at all regardless.