Since there seems to be so much hand wringing going on over every phrase written in Clint and Gene’s receiver reviews, Gene asked me if I would shed a little light on receiver product designs. I am in the process of writing a full article on the product design process so that we all may better understand how a particular product with specific power and features comes to market. But for the sake of brevity in this forum here's some bottom line facts:
1. Setting aside all the new surround decoding technologies that seem to have come up every year for the last 10 years since Dolby Digital debuted, in a receiver we're talking about most of the $$ going to very mature analog amplifier technologies, display elements, cost of steel chassis, faceplates, packing, cartons, manuals etc. If you add all these fairly fixed costs up you're at about 2/3 to 3/4 of the whole cost of a receiver before you even give the Engineering guys your power and features "wish list".
2. If you're a Yamaha or Denon or Onkyo, etc. you already have tried-and-true circuitry (Like Top Art, for instance, which Yamaha introduced over 15 years ago) which is known to produce your company's "characteristic sound". That's what you have to use. (A generalization but close enough for now.)
3. The tried-and-true amplifier and power supply circuitry comes from vendors your company has probably been using for many, many years. And in a lot of instances your competitors may be buying the exact same parts from the exact same company. (This scenario is slightly different in Yamaha's case in some instances but I'll talk about that in my full length article).
4. So, if you're the engineer, you have predefined pricepoints which you know you must hit for every single part in that receiver. (And here I'm talking about the "fixed" price points for receivers between $300 SRP and ~$1200 SRP.) You're designing a new model because:
a) that's your job
b) the competition is coming up with new models so you need to compete with something else which is "new" and
c) some of those "fixed cost" items always have some sort of "price creep" due to lack of supply or whatever but you, Mr. Engineer, have to be the guy who figures out how to keep the sum of all of your costs the same. This isn't easy but this is the reality of the situation under which new designs are born.
5. Now, given 1, 2, 3, and 4 above. How is it possible for you, Mr. Engineer, to use the same fixed costs as you did in the last receiver at that fixed-cost-formula-price-point (or more probably Increased costs) and fixed circuit designs, which will yield the "company sound", and still make your new receiver somehow sound "better" ??
The answer is that most of the time a new design doesn't "sound better". It almost can't. In my 7 1/2 years as Yamaha's Product Manager, through literally hundreds of product iterations I do remember one particular integrated amp, the A-1000, that sounded incredible for it's price point. And we had to beg the company to keep it in the line for another year because with it's layered board layout it was too hard to build labor-wise to justify its low (for that time) price point.
Keep in mind that the sound versus cost of the A-1000's amplifier section was what was so costly to build. The new curve ball hitting all the receiver manufacturers for the last ten years was how to absorb the cost of the newest decoding technology , like Pro Logic IIx, which is demanded immediately by consumers as soon as they hear about it, if a receiver line is to stay even viable.
Is it any wonder then that, save for the very hi-end "statement" receivers, it seems like folly to expect "better sound" from a manufacturer's bread-and-butter receiver line-ups?
