For 7 years now (or close to it) I have been the extremely proud owner of Rotel audio equipment and I don’t think I could ever go to another brand. The solidity, quality of sound, relatively low price (around $2000 per unit – not bad in the audiophile market) and the fact that they hold their value well… makes these beauties worth every penny.

The Rotel that I currently use as my core entertainment unit is pretty old now so it doesn’t have the HMDI inputs and TrueHD decoding, however, it does a phenomenal job of DTS EX and Doly Digital 5.1. Simply put, I can’t recommend it enough and I have found it on ebay for as little as $600 USD including shipping (it is a beast at 20+lbs). Here it is in case any of you want to make a worthwhile upgrade to your home system:

Rotel RSX-1056

(you can click the rear shot for a larger view)

I used to have this receiver matched with a heart-wrenchingly beautiful set of  B&W 805 speakers (aka dream speakers – the same they use at the Abbey Road studio) which I sold a couple years back because I knew my new wife and I would have a little one running around soon. Here is a shot of them except mine were a beautiful chestnut color… I will revisit this page every once in a while to remember and dream 🙂 so this is mostly for my own delight.

These 805’s produced sound that rendered many of the cds I had new again. Yes, I said new. Every song came alive with sounds that I had never heard before on the radio or on my older set of speakers. These speakers were an absolute pleasure to own – even if I was constantly a little paranoid about anything happening to them 🙂

Anyway, I mostly posted this for myself so that someday, worst comes to worst, I could look back at this fondly. I also figured it might give one or two people that last push to get a Rotel or a B&W speaker set.