The reason I ask is I just bought a new Onkyo TX-NR656. I went from an old Sony and I was immediately wowed by the hi-res audio and the video looked great. Price was good and features are decent, but I wanted to hear from you fellow geek heads on what you thought about Onkyo receivers.
I personally would not buy Onkyo or recommend Onkyo to any of my family and friends because of Onkyo's terrible reputation of customer service and failure rate.
Hopefully you will have good luck with your Onkyo.
Would not be top of my list. Better than Sony lol. I think the issue for them has been quality, not performance. In the past, when quality wasn't an issue for them, I recommended them often.
I've had an Onkyo performing well for 5 years, from the period they had hdmi board/network chip issues, too. I didn't like that Onkyo dropped Audyssey in favor of their weak AccuEQ. While I got that Onkyo partly due to its alleged video capabilities but find my displays do a better job so just pass that thru (no legacy sources to upscale either). I think many avrs have suffered a bit with quality issues in recent years, and Onkyo seemed to have the worst of it for a while; apparently Yamaha has had the best record in the industry these days fwiw. If you like the features it offers and sounds good just enjoy it.
I will agree that they do run hot. I'm looking into installing a rack mounted fan for circulation. I'm not one to buy Mon$ter cables anyways, so that shouldn't be a problem.
If your going to add a fan to your system. You must have your AVR in a cabinet? I am on my second Onkyo and I'm researching for my third. Always lover the output. But there is a lot of heat. Mine is in a cabinet so I drilled more air holes in the back. I'm thinking about applying some sort of small fan to draw the heat out of the cabinet.
I love my ancient Onkyo TX-SR805. Back it in the day, it was a great value - it had features and specs way beyond it's selling price point vs competition, but nowadays on top what is a clearly cost cutting measure of removing Audyssey (imo huge mistake), they don't really stand out much besides still having low prices.
I agree - they run hot and few previous generations were notorious for high rate of failures, but they supposebly got their crap together since.
tl;dr: If I were to buy new AVR today, I'd only buy Denon or Marantz (same owner for both).
p.s.s.s: Next time ask here before buying it, not to get pat on the back after the fact as Herbu mentioned