Score! free Kenwood receiver

[3-LockBox]

I helped my father-in-law clean out a rental house for his church - seems they had some renters skip rent, left behind some stuff. They didn't want to bother selling any of it, so they called Goowill to collect it. I got their days before and helped move some old furniture and saw two recievers (Sony, Kenwood) and a Toshiba DVD player. To make a long story short, niether the DVD player nor the Sony reciever works, but the Kenwood does. It did have a very loose volume control knob, but tightening the caption nut and soldering a wire did fix the problem (they were going to trach all three items).

The Kenwood is an older first or second generation surround receiver, a KR-V7020, and it kicks! I think it was rated 100 watts per channel, and 20 watts for the surround. I don't use surround in my home any way, so I'll just use it as stereo. It sounds great in my living room rig.

Anyone know of the KR-V7020?

[PeruvianSkies]

If I am thinking of the same receiver as you have...that is a really nice score...is it silver with a more rounded front appearance? I really liked the older Kenwood stuff...they were very sleek and always seemed to put out a nice sound.

[hydroman]

sweeeeet.

[SlumpBuster]

If I am thinking of the same receiver as you have...that is a really nice score...is it silver with a more rounded front appearance? I really liked the older Kenwood stuff...they were very sleek and always seemed to put out a nice sound.

Nope, its not silver (correct me if I'm wrong Lockbox). I have the KR-V7040 collecting dust in my garage.I too scored mine for free. It was my first surround reciever and I really dug it. I paired it with a couple of Infinity RS bookshelves (also free).

My recollection is that that 7040 was a later model with Dolby Prologic and the 7020 was a few years earlier with only Dolby. Both were from the early 90s and black. They were very cleanly designed and user freindly.

Two years ago I picked up my current main speakers. Ran home, hooked them up, and the Kenwood promptly revealed its limitation for stereo reproduction (polite way of saying it sucked). And I'm not talking about made up/imagined differences between amplifiers (Nerd: "I find Krell to be too analytical." Me: "Really? Lets go double blind that MFer with an Adcom." Nerd: "I have a bus to catch.")

I'm talking about the Kenwood not having enough juice, a complete lack of real bass response and repeatedly clipping and going into protection mode. Bass was sloppy, sloppy, and did I mention sloppy. It had been fine with the infinities, but those were only 8" bookshelves. Replaced it soon with SOTA Yamaha RX 1500 and made a huge improvement. Followed that with 25 year old Yammie amplifier and I don't miss the Kenwood one bit.

Hope that doesn't sound like a negative review. I had a wonderful introductory HT experience with that Kenwood. It served me well through grad school and my crawl out of student debt.

What speakers are you running with it?

[Fred333]

Nice find. To bad you couldn't save the other two.