I have been using Denon for several years with very little issues. I recently started looking at the Pioneer AVRs and was wanting some feedback.

Does Pioneer play well with Control4?
Which sounds better?

I have 2 low cost projects that I want to use the Elite VSX-45. What is your opinion on these?

TIA

Personally, I don't like selling five channel receivers. Today it might not matter, but what if they want to add more - speakers, sound, zone 2, it's not going to happen. You're not talking too much more to move up a step. For budget, the Denon 710 or 910 have been pretty solid, why move?

I can't speak to Control 4 reliability, but you may want to find out how Pioneer has done since the Onkyo takeover.

I don't think we've had any Pioneer issues in ~3 years or so. We had one with a power supply that went bad, and we used to have HDMI issues, but I think they "just work" for us now.

I have a VSX-60 at home on IP control from C4 and it just works day in, day out.

Every time I install a Denon product it breaks. I wish that wasn't the case, because they are so supportive of our industry. We just have no luck with them at all. Sucks.

Exact opposite experience. Installing Denon/Marantz for the last 12 years. Very rare to have issues that require support. Admittedly more lately but still few and far between.

I tried two Pioneer receivers and BOTH died just after warranty expired. Repair facility quoted $700+ on each and said repairs are expensive because Pioneer is being sold. I see **** has them now. I dont know what to make of that.

C

I still to this day don't understand how different dealers can have such drastically different experiences with the same product lines. It ALWAYS happens! One guy has a 75% failure rate, another guy has a 1% failure rate with the same product.

Must be humidity related.....or magnetic field.....or electrical utility weirdness...or something else environmental.

Or....I am going there....good old fashioned installer error. :P It's Friday!!

Ive Moved to Sony ES AVRs...Phenomenal receivers, sound amazing and the integration is flawless.

Ive only been using them for a few months so cant speak to reliability just yet, but so far I love them. Still feel dirty putting them in quotes but after my 5009fiasco last year these are holding up much better!

BTW: the ES3000 is a true 2x6 Matrix that works very very well!

but you may want to find out how Pioneer has done since the Onkyo takeover.

Onkyo bought Pioneer?

Still separate companies but majority (large majority) of stock held by Onkyo.

Control4 and Pioneer receivers work well together. In a previous life I was involved in getting the drivers created properly. I've been using C4 with various Pioneer & Elite models for years with no issues.

PiOnkyo or Onkyneer, brought to you by S@@p !

Neither have a great ring, I guess. I don't think it was so much Onkyo buying, rather than Pioneer selling, saying "Get me out of that AV BS!!"

I've had this experience too. Units that were gold for me were train wrecks for another.

In a few cases it was, literally, dependent on the relative humidity. The units in question had an ESD issue that was latent in the Northeast, but in the dry Southwest, the units were dropping like flies.

In some cases where there were multiple factories. You could drop a unit in front of me, and after working with it for a while, I could tell you which factory built the unit and there were differences in overall reliability too. (no, I didn't need to look at the sticker) Because of shipping considerations, I can imagine that certain regions would tend to receive units built in one factory or the other.

In many cases I suspect that an MBA got a nice bonus for finding a (way off shore) manufacturing deal that was too good to be true. It was and those units were reputation busters.

At one point we sold a lot of Nakamichi cassette decks. I dreaded the day when they announced that they were opening an offshore production facility for one model. But, they said that there would be Nakamichi engineers on site to monitor quality control. On these units I could not tell them apart unless I looked on the box. Then one day I could tell them apart and shortly thereafter I found out that the engineers had gone home.