What Became of Pioneer, One of Japan’s Legendary Hi-Fi Trio?

【Legendary Trio of Japanese Hi-Fi】
Sansui Electric｜Legendary Trio?｜Pioneer｜Merger with ONKYO

What concerns me is the fate of Pioneer, which was the only one of the Big Three to have kept a proper audio business going, and which had been one of the largest audio equipment manufacturers in the world.

Over the past few years their AV business has been shrinking steadily, and the integrated amplifiers and SACD players that remain in the pure audio line-up — excluding AV home theatre — have ended up as A-10 / A-30 / A-50 / A-70 / PD-10 / PD-30 / PD-70, with another three or four grades crammed in below at entry level — and the whole lot has turned into these rather charmless silver lunchboxes. I honestly cannot tell the budget models apart from the mid-range ones; they all look identical. When I first saw the current new products, I genuinely thought they were prototypes or something still in development.

Is this all a reaction to the A-A6 / A-A9 / PD-D6 / PD-D9 series not selling as well as hoped — those models that looked rather odd in photographs thanks to their avant-garde design, yet had a composed, premium quality about them in person?

My feeling is that if the A-A6 / A-A9 / PD-D6 / PD-D9 series had been priced more accessibly, while keeping the design philosophy and the sense of quality — just without those extreme stepped recesses on the front panel — they probably would have sold perfectly well in the ordinary market. And yet with the new products they’ve gone and made another drastic design change. You see the same thing with recent hi-res Sony and Yamaha products too, but I can’t help thinking they’ve gone rather too far in their overreaction — well past “simple is best” and into something almost penitential.

That said, the slim network audio players — the Pioneer N-30, N-50, and N-50A — are among the rare Pioneer hits of recent years. For anyone looking for a network audio player under 50,000 yen on the street, these are the most highly regarded models in terms of sound quality and price-to-performance. It’s curious how a simple design like this, just by being a little lower in profile, loses that flat, featureless awkwardness and actually starts to feel modern and even beautiful.

And right now, the new product I really want people to pay attention to is the headphone amplifier and USB DAC combo, the PIONEER U-05. The U-05 is a semi-half-width component, 296 mm wide, similar in concept to the ONKYO DAC-1000 — but beyond being a D/A converter, it also serves as a high-grade headphone amplifier with 4-pin and 3-pin XLR balanced outputs. That’s quite something to look forward to. As a Pioneer user myself, I’m rather keenly interested — and quietly hoping it sells well.

Then there is the question of sound. In the 1990s, Pioneer’s CD players with Legato Link Conversion sounded extraordinarily good — and there was a certain charm to those turntable mechanisms that loaded the disc upside down as well. I suspect quite a few fans are still attached to those memories, and to the champagne-gold casework design that carried through from that era into the LD players too. Pioneer components had a distinctly Japanese clarity about their sound, whilst the sense of reverberation and soundstage was wet and beautifully coloured.

The problem with Pioneer’s current pure audio products is not the heavily discounted street prices, nor the sound quality — it’s the unremarkable appearance that conveys so little sense of premium quality, and, more than anything else, the fact that they haven’t properly inherited and carried forward the appeal of the Pioneer brand, along with the traditions and character that ought to run through it. Legato Link Conversion, the honeycomb chassis — please don’t just pretend those things never existed.

So does that mean I simply dislike Pioneer’s current minimalist design? Actually, no — personally, I might even prefer it to the old champagne gold; it feels cleaner somehow. Though I’m not entirely sure what I’m on about at this point.

What I do think, though, is that the cabinets are unnecessarily large and tall relative to the circuits and components inside. If the entry-level amplifiers and SACD players had all been matched to the front panel dimensions of the N-30 and N-50, there would have been a much greater sense of coherence across the range. Why, at this stage, go to the trouble of showing off full-size vintage-tank-style casework when the insides are actually rather sparse? — though I’ll admit this is fairly much my own one-sided preference talking.

And to be completely honest, the stepped design of the previous-generation A-A6mk2 / A-A9mk2 / PD-D6mk2 / PD-D9mk2 series was better than what we have now. It genuinely looked as though it might cost hundreds of thousands of yen — a proper good design with real presence. That’s partly why the design change stings so much. Sorry for going on about it.

Such is Pioneer as things stand. I had been quietly puzzled, wondering what they intended to do with an audio business that seemed to be contracting year by year — and then, before I knew it, Pioneer and ONKYO had merged, apparently without my noticing. To be continued.

【Legendary Trio of Japanese Hi-Fi】
Sansui Electric｜Legendary Trio?｜Pioneer｜Merger with ONKYO