Someone, probably even Onkyo, probably released a product that was just as good and cost much less for the initial purchase.
The sales pitch was probably something like “never buy a new receiver again, just update the card for a fraction of the cost”. But, it wasn’t enough to overcome the extra up front cost.
They’re all competing goals going on. Sure, buy some normal speakers. Add an amp, get one that can accept some form of physical control remotely. Now add in a computer control device to accept remote content and send control signals to the amp. Update the control device software to support new services and technologies as they come out. Allow the control device to be upgraded independently of the amp and speakers. Overcome the duplicate power supply requirements, wire it all together, now make it look nice. Plus, keep the price down. Bonus, compete with a product that integrates it all and is cheaper to acquire.
It can be done, but it’s for a niche market, the cheaper integrated solution wins every time for the larger audience.
Just out of curiosity, how feasible would it be to make a kit that replaces the computer, so that the speakers and amplifier can still be used? Couldn’t the bricked control chips be replaced with a bit of soldering, making the whole DMCA issue moot?
Really, we need a cottage industry of shops who will refurbish things like this.
Some come with power supplies, some don’t, it’s a weird one. And the ones that do come with power supplies are horribly under powered at 1 amp or maybe if you’re lucky 2 amps @ 12v. The power jack is mercifully forgiving though and takes a range of sizes and works with most laptop power supplies I’ve tried. Powered by an old Thinkpad 19 volt 60 watt power supply the thing is indeed imbued with sorcery and will rock the house. I heart chip amps.
Edited to add: and for portable usage, the 24v max voltage makes them ideally suited to be powered by drill batteries, which most folks have… Mine last like 6 hours of cranked music on my Ryobi drill’s battery pack, which are easily swapped when it goes dead and charges in like 20 minutes.
The rumor I heard was that they couldn’t get hdmi 1.1 certification. So if you wanted to plug in a hddvd player, you’d have to use the analogue audio connections-- if the player even had them.
Throw out the controller board and drop in a Raspberry Pi with audio hat. That’s the hardware sorted out. I leave the problem of the software as an exercise.
(paired with good speakers), they make things sound awesome. But since most set top boxes, game consoles, disc players and streaming boxes need at least HDMI 1.1 (that’s 1080p-- not 4k), not HDMI 1.0, it’s a questionable buy.
I’ve got a pretty high-end home theater and I’ve looked for a way to ditch the receiver. I’m only using it for multi-channel audio processing right now. Everything else goes through a dedicated pro-level video switch/scaler and a pro-level audio DSP. Unfortunately the only remotely affordable digital movie audio decoding comes from consumer hardware. I’ve looked into cinema oriented solutions for atmos since my receiver doesn’t have it but my speaker configuration would be amenable. It would cost me waaaay to much to get a cinema oriented solution and a Dolby system wouldn’t handle the non-dolby formats. So in the realm of crappy consumer processors I stay. I’d really love to get that 4U of space back in my rack too…
That’s just the sound card (source) component, so you also need an amp. A pair of mono TDA8932 amps will only set you back $4 and have surprisingly good sound, but if you’re an audiophile you need to get up as high as $12 or so, not counting the brilliant pebbles.
Here’s something I recently kludged together and swapped into our system while I did some troubleshooting on our 80s amp; I think together with the power supply I spent almost $18 on it. That’s high, but I wanted the TC2001/STA508 chip combo to reproduce that good 70s/80s sound.
The price/performance ratio of Class-D amps is dropping so rapidly that buying recent technology new (from China) seems to be the cheap way to go these days.
Someone could probably figure out a way to unlock the bootloader to put a custom firmware on there. I’d imagine most of the stuff on the board is off the shelf components with the main “magic” being in the firmware itself. Of course, all of this requires work.
Another option is to just dump all the electronics entirely and install a Raspberry Pi with a high quality amplifier and DAC HAT. Wiring up the existing controls may be tricky or fiddly, but the rest of it should be pretty simple. The speakers themselves are just regular speakers after all.
I think the Raspberry Pi route could be commercially feasible. A kit that small shops can offer, in a “bing in your Sonos and we’ll upgrade” action. Tout the way it cuts down on waste, supports local shops, and so on.
Since the DRM can’t legally be circumvented, replacing the internals with DRM and only those components should be a goal.
I don’t think it’s possible to make a commercially viable product with a Pi because of the SD card corruption issue. I have a few Pi;s running 24/7 and I seem to get at least one corrupting every year, and I shut them down properly. If someone is unplugging it routinely it’ll get corrupted for sure. That gets less with a read only file system but I gather it’s still an issue. There’s still no inexpensive off the shelf industrial grade Linux gizmo that I’m aware of that’s cheap enough to use in a small scale product. Post if anyone does though! The Chip Pro from NextThing was awesome, but sadly they went out of business. And there’s also the issue of having a long bootup time, but I guess that’s solvable by putting the device to sleep instead of fully off.
FriendlyElec have some cheap SBCs (like this one) that can boot off eMMC instead of a flash card. The Rock64 board I’m using in a travel NAS also has an eMMC socket, but I haven’t tried using it.
