Onkyo A-G10

The Onkyo A-G10 (Integra A-2001 in Japan, Integra A-8990 in Europe) is a big 30 kilo monster mutha with all that was cool then - and highly marketable, too.

I'm of course taalking about the inclusion of a digital section inside an analog amplifier - just plug in your D.A.T., your D.A.B. and, of course, your CD player and control everything from just one place and one remote control.

Of course, in 1988, D.A.B. still was of the science-fiction-esque future (but it will soon fall on our heads now, alas), D.A.T. was brand new and horrendously expensive (but still knew nothing about SCMS) and CD players were just beginning to come out of their infancy (d/a wise, drive-wise, nothing has been ever done that was better and more reliable than Philips' own CDM drives - but I digress).

However, as exciting as this one-piece / one-control may have been, it seems the public didn't buy it. Or not enough.
If Pioneer sold quite a few C-90, Denon some DAP-5500, Onkyo some A-G10 and Technics very few SU-V90D, only Sony managed to successfully sell the concept with its immensely successful TA-E77ESD preamplifier, which, besides fully adhering to the 1987/1988 concept, also was a very musical piece. But I digress again.

So - The A-G10 holds most of the digital technology present in the DX-G10 : two 18bit Acculinear converters, with Opto-Drive.
Added were one optical digital input, one rec/play optical input loop, two coaxial digital inputs, plus one digital processor loop and a DAT rec/play loop - MiniDisc didn't exist yet.

The japanese A-2001 has two more digital inputs and a digital processor loop added, with richer digital rec and analogue rec positions.

Three composite video inputs were present on all versions, alongwith two outputs for monitoring & recording.

Doing the feeding and smoothing are eight 12,000µF caps, high speed switching diodes in the left and right channel rectifier blocks, a huge power transformer with five windings for analogue sections, and a digital section that has its own discrete power transformer.

The finishing touch is the RC-126A IR remote control which is sided with real wood panels which matches the A-G10's real wood piano finish sideburns ; it allows volume up, volume down and absolute phase switching.

As for the other separates in the series (T-G10, DX-G10 and the earlier P-308 / M-508) the A-G10 sports a Grand Integra badge in the USA while the rest of the world, Japan included, saw it with only Integra.



Original japanese catalogs now at hand... but not scanned yet.

Nudies of a real A-2001 here.
A view of the differential amp Opto blocks you can see at Mr Nisi's.
An A-2001 under repair at the indispensable amp8.com.