Quote Originally Posted by dennykyser
After hearing nothing but negatives about Sony, I am unsure about my Circuit City purchase last week of the Sony STR-DE898. I thought it was the most bang for the buck $299.00 with 3 year replacement warranty but dont want to find out a year down the road I should have spent a little more to get better quality.

I am sure I can exchange the reciever since I just purchased it 3 days ago and the next step up would be the 90W Onkyo TX-SR603X $434.00 or the Onkyo TX-SR703 which would really be strething it at $759.00.

What do you guys sugest, I will have to exchange there I am sure so not as many options as I would like.
Do I upgrade now so I dont loose any $$$ or do I just do as planed and spend the $$ to replace my cheap speakers?

I have the Sony De-975. I replaced it with a Yamaha because it couldn't power my Paradigm speaker adequately. If you are using speakers that are easy to drive then I don't think the Sony is a bad product. I don't know if your model has the equalizer mode but I thought that on mine when this function is used it sounded pretty good. I also liked the Cinema soundfields, and the lower bass freq where slightly better than the Yamaha.
In my opinion however I think that spending the money on a good quality av receiver is the way to go. Even cheap speakers will sound better and you can probably live with it till you have the cash for better speakers. Also get something that has pre-outs so that in the future if you choose to upgrade to a power amp you can use your receiver as a pre-amp. If I remember correctly the Sony doesn't have pre-outs. Even if you don't plan on spending a large sum of money on home audio, I think you should plan your purchases so that you can upgrade without having to scrap what you just spent your hard earned cash on. This is where I wasted a lot of money when I started out. Thinking that an entry receiver is good enough. Then down the road you get more serious about audio and you end up spending more money to replace what you should have bought in the first place.

Just my .02 cents