What are AV receiver and AV amplifier?

The component that receives signals is called a tuner. A receiver is an integrated system that includes both a tuner and an amplifier. Anything that's advertised as a receiver will have both components. You can buy tuners and amplifiers separately but usually only at the high end.

You can also buy an integrated system that includes a CD player and/or cassette deck. The cassette deck may have a recording head or it may only be capable of playback.

You can even buy an integrated system that includes speakers. Be wary of those. Sometimes the output signal to the speakers and the connections are proprietary rather than standard, which means you can't upgrade yourself to better speakers when you are ready.

Generally what has the biggest impact on the quality of the music you play is your speakers. You can get cheap ones that will handle a fair amount of power and play rather loudly, but they won't have really good crisp sound. Go to a place where you can listen to the speakers and switch them back and forth and compare them. You can get some really compact speakers these days that will fit in a small room, consisting of one sub-woofer that gives you good clear bass and two mylar ribbon speakers for the mid and high range sounds. Your ears don't hear bass directionally so you don't need two bass speakers, which tend to be pretty expensive and really bulky, so this setup is both compact and economical.

You're better off to get a receiver with the minimum amount of features that satisfy you--like no cassette deck if you don't have any cassettes, and not 600 watts of power if you're not going to have 50 people over to listen to it in your palace--and spend as much as you can on speakers that are right but not overkill for your space.

As with everything, Costco always has some really good deals on small integrated systems--tuner, amplifier, CD player, speakers, and possibly cassette deck. They usually have two or three ranging from $100 to $150. They may have the proprietary connection problem so you can't upgrade you speakers, but for that price you can give it to your little brother when you're ready to move up. The problem with Costco is they don't have a listening room so it's hard to get a good idea whether you like it. Costco is also a steel building with no radio reception, so bring your own CD to test it.

 

Brand names are getting kind of irrelevant. They all outsource their manufacturing and the factories change as the contracts expire. Audio is a very mature technology so the quality of the engineering and manufacturing is usually more important than the underlying design.

Speakers are the exception. Electrostatic headphones became commercially available about thirty years ago, then became available as gigantic, expensive, power-gobbling loudspeakers about fifteen years ago, and now are bundled with bottom-end systems at Costco. And they are really good because they have no heavy parts and therefore almost no inertia.

Whatever you buy, get a good warranty. Some of these things kick the bucket within a few months and you want to be able to return them for a refund and buy something else, not mess around with a repair that will take a couple of weeks or maybe forever. Yet another advantage of Costco, their liberal return policy. I've bought things at Costco that failed, but never after the store warranty expired.

If you really watch a lot of movies and you really appreciate surround sound, then go for it. But you're going to pay a lot of money for it. And you'd better have a nice big room to place all those speakers at the optimum distance. And a really really big room if you plan on having more than just two people in chairs carefully positioned in the acoustic center of the space.

I find it rather annoying in movies when they switch to a different camera in a scene and so they have to move the voices and other sound sources around to synch with it. Right and left, front and back, keep shifting and it's distracting.

I'm old enough to remember when stereophonic sound first came on the market. I'm a musician who really notices stuff like that, but unless I'm paying rapt attention to the music with headphones--not the soundtrack of a movie I'm watching and not playing in the room while I'm talking to people or doing something else--stereo doesn't make a big difference to me. For me, surround sound is just an expensive and rather cumbersome gimmick.

 

Graphic equalizers have fallen out of vogue and I just don't understand why. Regardless of how perfect your speakers are, there are two other major attributes to your sound experience: Your room and your personal taste. Almost all rooms have resonant frequencies and dead spots in the sonic spectrum, and in the most challenging rooms they change as you walk from one spot to another. Of course the younger generation seems to have solved that problem rather cheaply, by being born with headphones welded to their ears. Oddly enough they're usually earbuds instead of real phones, which means they've taken the "hi" out of "hi-fi."

And then you may have a preference for boosts and cuts at various points in the spectrum. I certainly do, and it's not just the smooth curve that identifies my g-g-generation's gradual hearing loss in the midrange from too many Black Sabbath concerts. I just don't like my music played back with the same sound profile as perfectly reproduced speech.

If you can find a pair of speakers that are good, but just don't happen to give you a flat curve in your room or just in your head, a graphic equalizer for less than a hundred bucks may give you the sound you want without spending five hundred bucks for "better" speakers.

 

I don't think that the impedance of the speakers is an important difference. The only impact that will have is if you're going to put the speakers fifty feet from the receiver, 6 ohm speakers will require heavier gauge wire than 8 ohm speakers because the wires are carrying more current. (Or do I have that backwards... hard to believe I almost majored in electrical engineering.) If that's the only difference between the two systems it's not a deal-breaker.