|
however, its companion piece the T-555 Tuner is a different story. one customer service rep could not even tell me about the product. I requested another rep. When calling Onkyo customer service IT WAS A JOKE.
If ONkyo did a little work on the T-4555 it would be an excellent tuner. I returned the tuner, and I bought the Marantz which was on sale. I called back, and got another rep, he seemed knowledgeable and he was very apologetic for the misinformation I got from the other rep. for example: the A-9555 integrated amplifier is truly an audiophile piece of equipment. it exudes all the qualities one looks for in an audiophile quality integrated amp. you have to buy a separate tuner to get XM or Sirius radio. another said that it was fully capable and ready to recieve XM or Sirius radio and all I had to do was subscribe to them.
it is fully ready for XM or sirius. Onkyo always seems to make a few really nice gems in separate components. Onkyo advertises that it is Satellite radio ready, when it is not. and was told to call back.
(For instance, see the Marantz ST7001). This is so cheap. A good tuner but browsing the radio spectrum is a push button affair. There is a button to decrease the frequency and one to increase it. A tuner in this price range should have a rotary dial that allows quick channel surfing.
It seems well built for the money, as all Onkyo products are, in my experience. Operation has been flawless, with the added perk of remote control of pretty much every function. All in all, a very high value product. OK, if you need a tuner and you don't want to be caught with your pants down, format-wise, then this is the one you want. AM, FM, RDS, Sirius, XM, and HD-Radio (which I LOVE)., this tuner can do them all. Sound quality is very good to my ears, but then again, I don't have a $3000 Magnum Dynalab tuner to compare it to.
I had trouble with this tuner receiving both XM radio and HD radio.I actually returned one unit in exchange for another and the problem continued. My phone calls to both XM radio and Onkyo were unrevealing and terribly unhelpful.
But beware, you antenna may actually be too good.Another quirk is that you have to press a button to find out what is being played rather than the information appearing automatically. After experimenting I found that my roof antenna was putting out TOO STRONG a signal and probably over loading the tuning circuits.
Both companies hit a new low in providing useless information. The unit has excellent sound and makes the best of the compressed formatson XM and HD radio.
I have never written a review on Amazon but I felt this needed to be delt with. After listening to XM radio the tuner was unable to decode the HD signal.
I added a 3dB attenuator and the problem was solved.
It is Sirius and XM READY, meaning it does not have a built in tuner and you will need to buy a separate unit to get either one. Other than that I have no complaints and it seems to be a nice unit, but I would not have bought it if I had known it didn't have the tuner built in. Unit is very nice, looks great in the stack with my other equipment (NAD Amp & PreAmp and Denon SACD player), but please read carefully. Somewhat disappointing for the price and not very well documented here.
|
