Hi all - new to the forum. I know this thread is pretty old but thought I'd add to it anyway. I just picked up a VSX-1124-K for $300 & change, which is a pretty good deal up here north of the 49th. I bought it primarily to enhance audio (SS) for watching movies & other video on my HDTV, which up until now has had the sound piped through my vintage 2 channel Pioneer audio gear.
However, I was also looking at using it to serve up my digital music collection, most of which is in crappy MP3 format for now, but I want to start ripping my extensive vinyl collection to lossless digital format. I've been watching for an affordable AVR at a decent price with pre outs for the front for awhile now, and when a local dealer started moving out all their Pioneer gear I jumped on the 1124. My vintage gear that powers the front channels is a Pioneer Spec-1 preamp, Harmon Kardon Citation 16 power amp, Pioneer PL-570 TT & RT-101 RTR. Oh - and Pioneer HPM-150 speakers.
This is my first foray into new audio gear in decades, and wow what an adjustment. I'm used to plugging something into the back of the preamp, moving the selector to it, and pressing "play". With this thing it took me a couple of beers just to figure out how to get it to play 2 channel output from the TV, wading through what seemed to be countless menus. Then I picked up a couple of Pioneer bookshelf speakers, a center channel speaker and borrowed a couple of Nuance slightly-larger-than-bookshelf speakers. That was another couple of beers worth trying to figure out how to get them working the way I wanted. I'm on the lookout for a sub and am curious what it will add, as the 15.75" woofers on the HPM 150's already provide plenty of bass.
Given the power of this thing, I'm tempted to see how it sounds on it's own powering the big vintage 150's. My music listening sessions will likely be just 2 channel so for vinyl & tape, so I don't suppose I even need it powered on, but if I can utilize the 1124 to give the the option of controlling volume remotely that would be a "nice to have" for me.
For my digital music I'm wondering that the best approach is, serve it through my ASUS O!play media server? iTunes? Windows media server? I keep all of my music & video (that's not on Bluray or DVD) on a NAS drive & I also have the 1124 hardwired in to my home LAN.
