New amp time! Pioneer SC 2023 or Onkyo NR828?

[womble9]

Morning guys. Grabbed myself a Sony 1040 mid last week and whilst I quite like it I've decided to take RS up in their kind offer and return it and go for something with a little more clout / better fidelity. I've narrowed it down to two amps both of which seem to fulfil pretty much all of my requirements those being plenty of connectivity, network features and multi zones (the pioneer seems to ace the onkyo a little here with Airplay and I don't need wifi as I can hard wire it) and decent control apps too. They'll be driving my Mezzo 5.1 package and I'm pretty sure that they'll be up to the job of that too but I was wondering if there's any one out there would say that one should be chosen over the other?? Any help / thought would be much appreciated

 

[Silver Serpent]

From what I've seen, the 828 hasn't had the best of reviews and the Onkyo's do run hot.

The feedback on the 2023 is quite good, so if demoing isn't possible, I'd be inclined to swing that way.

It's £100 cheaper too I think, isn't it?

 

[womble9]

I've found the Onkyo at the same price as the Pioneer which was what brought it into the equation as I had set myself a £500 limit. I wasn't aware that the Onkyos were still an amp that ran hot (is this maybe why I read of quite a few reliability issues on them? and hadn't taken that into consideration bit it's another tick on the Pioneers list of pluses for me.

 

[sclarke81]

Hey womble, have you made any progress with your decision? I had the Sony 1040 to start with and went back to RS with the intention of swapping it for the Onkyo 828, but came away with a Yamaha 775 instead. The more I've read and looked around at though, the more I have a hankering for the Pioneer.

I'm going to give the Yamaha a fair run first though. The guy in RS also made me a little unsure about pairing the Pioneer with Q Acoustics speakers.

 

[MUGGY2]

Onkyo's do not run hot anymore. Audition both and decide.

 

[womble9]

Hi guys sorry for the slow reply, I've been snowed under somewhat .

Anyway I took the plunge and went for the Pioneer. I've got a friend who's got an 828 and whilst he's perfectly happy with it sound and performance wise he confirmed that it does indeed run at quite a temperature. It was given to him by Onkyo after nearly 6 months of haggling after his very hotly running 808 as good as blew up. Out of interest when running the Onkyo uses 720 watts, the Pioneer 290 and the Sony 1040 240 watts. Just why do the Onkyos use so much more power?? Anyway his issues and the heat output did put me off a little bit but there were other factors which swayed me towards the Pioneer such as AirPlay, a much cleaner look to the amp (strange as I use to love things with loads of buttons on them ha ha) a very nice looking App and finally the fact that I managed to get Richer Sounds (who also seemed to rate it more highly than the Onkyo) to price match it at £449 which gave me £50 to splash on a warranty and still left me £100 better off than if I'd gone for the Onkyo .

 

[mda]

womble9, my experience with the Onkyo 828 is very different to your friends. Running it at fairly high volumes with 5.1 output I rarely see it pulling more than 170 - 180 watts and about 7 watts in standby (HDMI passthrough). The vented section at the top of the case does get warm during use but I've yet to hear the fan come on after several weeks of demoing. On both of the Pioneer SC-LX57 units I tried the fan would come on after approx 30 minutes and then constantly cycle off / on even when idling with no sound output. As much as I liked everything else about the Pioneer, this fan noise was a real deal breaker for me as it was very noticeable during dialogue / quieter scenes. It was like running a Home Theatre PC from 10 years ago.

 

[womble9]

Interesting. To be fair I just grabbed the watts used from the RS specs so maybe they're wrong. Fingers crossed that my new pioneer (as yet to be set up) doesn't prove to have an intrusive fan. That would annoy me more than it getting a bit warm!!