undoubtly, SONY’s AVR product had been absent in local market for a long time… perhaps more than 10yrs or longer or so…
chances are slim definitely… as low as teeny weeny 1% chance, look at SONY’s offering of their UHD player in local market, u see how small they look at this market.
I think the Sony’s 360 Spatial Mapping will be better for surround sound IN HTs THAT HAVE LESS THAN OPTIMAL SPEAKER PLACEMENTS.
Andrew Robinson liked the Onkyo RZ70s sound quality, but he preferred the surround sound effects (while watching movies in his HT) using the Sony 7000ES, he has his rear surround speakers in-ceiling AND his 2 atmos speakers are also in the ceiling if im not wrong. He said the Sony does such a good job that it kind of negates the fact the rear speakers are in ceiling & make the sound feel like come from behind him in bed layer, while in the Onkyo, as great as it sounded he could tell the rear surround sound was coming from top behind him.
Such a shame they won’t be available in our market (or anywhere else outside of US for that matter)
Glowing review from audioholics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcyBHD2feIw
Interesting. I too have my living room rear surround very close to ceiling because of aesthetic reasons. This may definitely channel my interests in receivers towards Sony if I am to replace the Yamaha receiver in the living room.
Yeah, it would also probably benefit durian bro’s set-up with a challenging layout & less than ideal speaker placements for rear. I have yet to see a bad review of the Sony receivers and their spatial algorithm is getting fantastic praise all around, their set-up flow is pretty unique, the receiver asks details such as how far is the MLP from the display, how high is the display centre from floor, distance between display centre & centre channel etc, then it does the processing to lift the centre channel sound to make it feel like it’s coming from the centre of the screen, even gives options to achieve this, one of it is to use front height’s in conjunction with centre channel speaker to lift the sound higher. Such a shame really it’s a US only product.
Yeah, real pity can’t these Sony AVRs. I am tempted to try them… maybe Sony’s 360 Spatial is better than Dirac Live, Audyssey, etc.
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a comparison of the AZ5000ES against other 2nd top of the range Japanese makes that are about the same in performance and price range.
both Marantz and Sony could be much expensive than other makes, however, u should know that these 2 marques, are back by 5yrs warranty in American market while others range between 2~3yrs.
locally, price difference didn’t go as wide as USD$1000 between the models as the AVRs in the comparison list and our market, minus the SONY, are all backed with just one year warranty.
In Sg, the warranty is always shorter… most give 1 year only… 
And most of the times, failure happen right after warranty expires.
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Murphy’s Law 
yup… that’s the reality for Singapore market.
how to gain trust when u treat customers of certain market like 水魚?
local distributors really need to learn a thing or 2 from another consumer product industry… the Timepiece and Watch Industry, where warranty can goes as high as 5yrs with their inhouse engineering hearts.
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