Why Do AV Receivers So Rarely Satisfy Audiophiles?

From affordable entry-level models to flagship designs costing tens of thousands of dollars, the market offers an extraordinary range of choices.

Viewed purely in terms of value, the proposition can be difficult to argue with. A single chassis can handle decoding, drive a multichannel loudspeaker system, provide the heart of a home-theater setup, and still play conventional two-channel music. On paper, it seems like remarkably good value.

For many audiophiles, however, the picture is rather different.


The sound quality offered by most AV receivers is generally regarded as serviceable rather than genuinely high-end. Even flagship models, impressive as they may be in terms of features and processing capability, often deliver only respectable two-channel performance. For listeners who place music reproduction first, a dedicated two-channel system remains difficult to replace.


The usual explanation is straightforward.

An AV receiver is expected to perform a remarkable number of functions within a finite manufacturing budget. Processing, decoding, amplification, switching, video circuitry, power supplies, connectivity, control systems—the available resources must be divided among all of them. Inevitably, the argument goes, less can be devoted to any one aspect of performance, including sound quality.

It is a perfectly reasonable explanation.


But is it the whole story?

Consider a hypothetical AV receiver costing USD$10,000. If the resources devoted specifically to its two-channel output section were equivalent to those found in a USD$700 dedicated stereo amplifier, one might reasonably expect its two-channel sound to approach that level of performance.

Yet anyone who has compared the two in practice will know that the result is often not so simple.


Over the past several years, Nirvana Audio's research has led us to believe that hardware specification and component cost represent only part of the equation.

Another factor may be equally important: interference.

And by interference, we are referring to something considerably broader than the familiar concerns of conventional audio engineering—noise floor, signal-to-noise ratio, or easily identifiable forms of electrical noise.

The interactions we have been investigating appear to be more complex, more deeply embedded, and more difficult to isolate than those conventional parameters alone would suggest.

It was this line of investigation that ultimately led Nirvana Audio in an unexpected direction.

By developing a deeper understanding of the factors that can interfere with musical reproduction, the company eventually began exploring an approach that could bring an extremely compact device, initially small enough to resemble a USB flash drive, into sound systems operating on an entirely different scale, including stadium sound systems used for world tours and designed to serve audiences of up to 80,000 people.

The objective was not to add power, replace amplification, or alter the fundamental architecture of those systems, but to address aspects of interference that Nirvana Audio had come to regard as significant to their perceived sonic performance.

So what, exactly, lies behind this approach?

And how did a project that began eight years ago eventually become the Chronos Optimizer for a world tour?

In the articles to come, we will begin telling that story.