Comment by mikepurvis
2 months ago
Some of the bigness is just tradition and buyer expectation (big = expensive). But also, modern AVRs are like 1000W devices amplifying 7, 9, even 11 channels of passives. That’s a lot of componentry and corresponding heat to shed— if you open one of those up, it’s not just empty space in there like an NES cartridge or something.
That makes some sense, but for those of us with two channels maxing out at 25W each, there seems to be some use for a smaller one. I think there are more people on the small end of the spectrum than those with a big surround deployment. I suppose they're mostly using sound bars with an HDMI input.
... that said, there is also a small market for "separates" where you have a decoding-only preamp that either feeds active speakers or another box containing just the multi-channel amplification:
https://www.marantz.com/en-ca/category/av-separates/
The output of these units is line-level signals feeding high-impedance loads. They could definitely be a fraction of the size they are.