Sound United came to our store last year and brought their engineering team for Denon/Marantz. Like 15 Japanese engineers and few white guys took a tour of the store. Boss apologized that we didn't have that much Denon out but more Marantz. The SU guys said no problem, its all the same team now and they prefer us to have the higher end Marantz around.
My guess is with the all the Onkyo brands, SU are probably going to discontinue the overlapping products between the Marantz/Denon stuff. Gibson really had no idea what they were doing with Onkyo/Pioneer and ran it into the ground and had to declare bankruptcy because their not guitar brands were losing money hand over fist.
It was being run into the ground but more consolidation is bad for the market. There's already huge stagnation in the AVR market and this will make it worse. Competition = good for consumers.
It feels like every so often lately we hear about some big acquisitions happening in the AV side. Samsung buying Harman and all their brands. Sound United only recently swallowed up Denon/Marantz. McIntosh traded hands a few times before buying out their previous owners.
With Oppo ceasing audio operations just kind of shows how tricky the market has become. Hard to say if SU didn't buy Onkyo's audio stuff, would they have had enough money to continue on or would have closed up like Oppo/been sold to different buyers.
With all those brands under the same corporate umbrella, I'll probably just stick with the higher end Yamaha stuff for home theater. I've found it to be in general more reliable with a better UI. I own Marantz now, and have been underwhelmed.
How long until Sound United buys out the Yamaha home theater side. SU will swallow up every receiver brand!
Wonder for us, who works with SU with Denon/Marantz if the Onkyo/Pioneer umbrella extends to us or they will want to keep it in big box stores. Sony makes us order a certain amount of their receivers for our quota every quarter.
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