As I write this, the 2025 International CES has just wrapped in Las Vegas. Perhaps the biggest news of the show for hi-fi enthusiasts was the fact that Onkyo is back, with a trio of stereo audiophile components coming later this year that evoke memories of the brand’s glory days. I’m here to tell you, though, that Onkyo is already back in a big way—at least with regard to home-theater gear—as evidenced by the newest addition to its RZ Series lineup, the TX-RZ30 ($1199, all prices USD).
The RZ30 is currently the most affordable RZ-series offering, but it has a few features you wouldn’t expect at its price point. Perhaps most noteworthy is the fact that it comes with a full license for Dirac Live room correction, rather than the band-limited version that typically ships with AVRs. Mind you, in many cases you’re probably better off not tweaking frequencies much higher than the 500Hz supported by Dirac Live without the optional full-bandwidth upgrade—or so I once thought. We’ll get there.
Also, very noteworthy (more noteworthy than I imagined at first) is the RZ30’s support for an optional $299 license to add Dirac Live Bass Control functionality, which not only works to more evenly distribute bass throughout the room, but also treats the subwoofer(s) and satellite speakers in your system as a system, not as a collection of separate transducers with separate roles. With Bass Control, the crossover between subwoofer and speakers is calculated as part of the room-correction filters, and I didn’t understand just how consequential that would be until I played around with it myself.
On its own, without all the Dirac stuff, the RZ30 is a well-equipped receiver for the price. It features nine amplified channels, delivering 100Wpc into 8 ohms or 170Wpc into 6 ohms (the latter specified with one channel driven), and two independent subwoofer outs, for a total of 9.2 channels of output, whether you use its internal amps or connect directly to the multichannel preamp outs. It sports six 8K/HDCP 2.3–compatible HDMI 2.1 inputs and two outputs, one with eARC, along with component- and composite-video inputs, six line-level stereo RCA inputs, one MM phono stage, AM and FM antenna connections, one coaxial digital in, and one optical digital in. It also features hardwired network connectivity along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with aptX HD.
Power consumption is specified as 760W, with 50W idle consumption and <2W in standby mode. If we generously assume 65% efficiency for the class-AB amps, that gives us a rough estimate of around 55Wpc with all nine channels driven at once, which is beefy for an AVR at this price. Given how hot the RZ30 runs, even with no content playing, I’m not convinced it performs that efficiently; still, it’s almost certainly enough power for most mid-sized rooms.
In terms of features, the RZ30 is also pretty packed, with support for all the major HDR standards (including HDR10+ and Dolby Vision), along with IMAX Enhanced, Roon Tested certification, AirPlay 2 and Chromecast connectivity, and more.
Setting up and dialing in the RZ30
As I said in my unboxing blog post, surround-sound receivers have next to no mainstream appeal anymore—especially given how good the higher-end Samsung soundbars are these days—and the RZ30 doesn’t even pretend to be beginner-friendly. OK, to be fair, it does sort of pretend, but only half-heartedly. For the most part, this is an AVR for hardcore home-theater DIYers who know exactly what they need and are willing to put in the work to dial in their systems to the nines.
I started the setup process by connecting my speakers—in this case, an RSL CG3 5.2-channel speaker system with dual Speedwoofer 10S subs, along with four GoldenEar SuperSat 3 speakers hung from hooks on the ceiling for overhead channels. The latter speakers were temporary, just to let me push the receiver as far as I could. But I find overhead sound effects distracting and overwhelming, and not conducive to proper evaluation of a receiver’s performance, so for the bulk of my critical listening, I just had the RSL 5.2 system connected.
I added my Roku Ultra streamer and Oppo UDP-205 universal disc player to the system via Monoprice 42674 HDMI cables, connected my TV, and installed Control4 drivers for the RZ30—which supports SDDP (Simple Device Discovery Protocol) and showed up in the Control4 Composer software immediately.
With that done, I fired up the system to start the configuration process, only to be met with a display-screen message reading: “Download Onkyo Controller app from Google Play or the App Store to your Android / iOS device and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the setup.” The app, though, just told me to follow the display-screen instructions—which were still directing me back to the app. So I exited out of the Initial Setup screen and dug all the way to the Miscellaneous menu to find a new path to the Initial Setup wizard, which at least allowed me to configure my speaker setup(s).
The system also tries to make you use the Onkyo Controller app for Dirac Live setup, but I couldn’t get that to work. I wasn’t interested in the backup suggestion of just using AccuEQ (one of the worst room-correction systems I’ve ever auditioned), so I fired up the Dirac Live app on my PC and went online to add a complimentary code Onkyo provided for this review to activate Bass Control (again, normally a $299 upgrade).
Taking this direct approach would have been my preference anyway, and it’s the route I took my second and third and fourth times through the Dirac setup process (more on that in a bit), but I was trying to approach the receiver through the eyes of the uninitiated, following the rules and suggestions set in front of me—and I found it nearly impossible to do so.
Long story short, if you’re shopping for the RZ30, you almost certainly know how to set up an AVR. As such, follow your instincts and you likely won’t have any problems, at least not with the receiver itself.
Dirac Live setup can be a bear even via the PC app once you really dig into the particulars, but that’s hardly Onkyo’s fault. It’s simply not a newb-friendly piece of software, and adding multiple speakers all around the room only makes the delicate balance of dialing in the master output volume of Dirac and the gain of the calibration microphone that much more difficult than it is in a stereo system. That’s especially true given how the software doesn’t offer you any guidance on the levels you should shoot for, outside of throwing up low-signal-to-noise warnings if the level is too low or clipping warnings if it’s too high relative to the mike gain. But after a bit of trial and error, especially when measuring from the extreme left and right seating positions, I managed to dial it in.
The details of my tinkering are honestly too much for the contents of one review, so I’ll be writing a larger editorial about my experiences with both Dirac Live bass management and Bass Control, but what you need to know here is that, ultimately, once I’d beaten the hell out of a full Atmos system and determined the Onkyo could handle it, I pared my system down to 5.2 channels and uploaded three different filter suites to the receiver. One of them was full-bandwidth with bass management, one was full-bandwidth with Bass Control, and a third relied on Bass Control but featured a max filter frequency of 917Hz, which is not far from two octaves above the Schroeder frequency of my room.
During the course of my testing, I played the same demo clips ad nauseum while cycling among these three filter suites to try and get a better sense of what they were doing.
How does the TX-RZ30 perform?
The long and short of the above is that the question of how the RZ30 performs really comprises two questions. The first: how does it perform independent of Dirac Live room correction? And the answer to that is: every bit as well as you would hope a $1200 AVR performs. Onkyo seems to have sorted out the dodgy HDMI-board issues that have plagued its AVRs for the past few years, and no matter how hard I pushed the receiver, I couldn’t coax it into the “limp mode” for which the brand has been notorious for a while.
It is, in short, a solid piece of hardware, despite some minor imperfections with the onscreen display (which would frequently flicker when I was adjusting the volume) and some mild annoyances, such as the fact that its HDMI board doesn’t support Quick Media Switching (although it does support Quick Frame Transport, Auto Low Latency Mode, Variable Refresh Rate, and Source-Based Tone Mapping).
The receiver runs slightly (and only slightly) cooler than a hydrothermal vent, so it definitely needs room to breathe, but it certainly doesn’t run much (if any) hotter than its Denon/Marantz competition. In short, if we want to take room correction out of the equation altogether, the RZ30 is a very fine piece of kit that is well worth every penny Onkyo is charging for it. It is, as I said in the intro, a clear sign that Onkyo is back and means business.
But what about with Dirac room correction? Especially with all the bells and whistles unlocked by the $299 Bass Control upgrade?
I mentioned above that I uploaded three different filter suites to the RZ30, and was pleasantly surprised to discover just how quickly the receiver could switch among them.
I started my evaluation of all three filters by loading up Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones on UHD Blu-ray and letting the opening scenes play. If you’re not familiar with the film, it begins with Senator Amidala’s J-type diplomatic barge (a big silver spaceship, if you’re not down with the nerdy lingo) flying through space and landing on the planet Coruscant, and such flyovers are always accompanied by some of the most difficult-to-reproduce bass of any film I know.
Starting with the full-bandwidth filter allowing Dirac to perform bass management but without Bass Control engaged, I was immediately impressed by how well the system integrated my RSL CG3 speakers and Speedwoofer 10S subs. I love this speaker system with all my heart, but it is not an easy one to integrate in terms of bass management, since the satellites have a pretty big bump in response around 150Hz but start to plummet below that.
Frankly, Dirac did a better job of calculating the right crossover frequencies than I ever could, and the result was good impact from that spaceship flyover, but also—arguably more importantly—from the male voices in the following scene, in which Jedi Masters Yoda, Mace Windu, and others meet with Chancellor Palpatine.
I’ve never heard the RSL system deliver the various male voices with their diverse fundamental frequencies so even-handedly, largely due to the interesting way in which this scene was mixed. The dry dialogue of all the vocal participants remains mixed in the center speaker—which, in the case of the CG23, has deeper bass extension than the smaller CG3s. But the reverberance of their voices is mixed into the left- and right-front channels quite strongly. So if you get much of a gap between the sub and satellites, the back-and-forth can start to sound hollow, and the left- and right-front speakers don’t sound like a good match for the center anymore.
Dirac via the RZ30 nipped that problem in the bud, to the point where I stopped thinking about mixing tricks and just got lost in the scene (despite having seen it dozens if not hundreds of times).
Still, though, backing up to the prior scene, that bass-heavy flyover did excite the pair of sliding mirrored closet doors on the left side of my room that always rattle a bit when I push the subs in the room too hard. Could Bass Control help with that? Audyssey LFC (Low Frequency Containment) has never quite been able to.
No need to beat around the bush here. Bass Control did. As I mentioned above, the second filter suite I put together was full-range, 20Hz-to-20kHz correction, with Bass Control turned on. And in watching that initial flyover scene again (and the subsequent explosion once the ship lands), I didn’t even notice during the first few critical listens that said mirror doors weren’t rattling. At all. And yet, switching back and forth between the full-range filters with and without Bass Control engaged, I didn’t lose anything at all in terms of bass impact. Quite the contrary, in fact. The low frequencies felt not only stronger, but also more controlled.
Mind you, as I’ve said numerous times, my preference is for band-limited application of room correction—even room correction as good as Dirac Live. As such, when switching over to my filter suite with Bass Control engaged but no frequency correction above 917Hz, I expected to hear some real differences above that point. To my surprise, I really didn’t.
Looking back over the measurements and filter design in Dirac, when run full-range, the system did smooth out a few very high-Q dips and valleys between ~1kHz and ~2.5kHz. But I just haven’t managed to find the right material to spotlight any audible differences that made. It also shaved about 2dB off the response of my speakers above 10kHz, but again, I just couldn’t hear it in any of the movies I threw at the system. For the most part, in the ray region, the full-range filter followed the response of my speakers in my room, which is as it should be. In either case—the full-range filter or the band-limited one—what I was left with was a stunningly coherent and cohesive high-fidelity surround soundfield virtually free from distractions.
Was music any different? Well, if I was going to hear any potential shortcomings of running the filters full-range, I would have expected to hear them in Andrew Bird’s Echolocations: River (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Wegawam Music Co. / Qobuz). Bird recorded the album live while standing in the Los Angeles River under the Glendale-Hyperion Bridge, and precise reproduction of high frequencies is essential to getting the sense of space in this recording right. Room correction run full-range almost always dulls some of the background noise, which takes on the impression of pink noise—and to be frank, whether it’s the drone of distant traffic or just the wind, I don’t know, but it gives the album much of its sonic character.
So, too, do the transients of Bird’s plucked fiddle strings, which can lose some of their bite and sizzle if you start mucking around with the upper frequencies or trying to hammer the speakers into a target curve that’s not right for the room.
If anything—and it goes against every fiber of my being to type these words, but I heard what I heard—the full-range filters actually did a better job of preserving the organic airiness of the recording. Even in stereo, the RZ30 pushed the mix out into the room in such a delightfully natural and enveloping way that I found myself struggling to focus on the “critical” part of critical listening.
Perhaps the best test of all, though, was “Hyperballad” from Björk’s album Post (16/44.1 FLAC, Atlantic Records / Qobuz). Again, having the Dirac filters engaged above the Schroeder frequency of my room didn’t really make any appreciable difference to the sound. But what a difference Bass Control made. Switching between the filter suites that engage Bass Control and the one that simply lets Dirac handle bass management, the biggest differences I heard were in the consistency of bass from seat to seat. With Bass Control on, I could move pretty much anywhere within the area of the room that could reasonably be considered suitable for human sitting without hearing any dips or peaks in bass response. Without Bass Control engaged, just moving my head back and forth would result in some deviations in bass linearity, even with two subs.
What other AVRs might you consider in this price range?
This is a tough one. Strictly going by price, the Denon AVR-X2800H ($1199) would seem to be the most comparable product, since it’s the exact same price as the RZ30 and is similarly spec’d. But it only has seven amplified channels (95Wpc into 8 ohms, two channels driven), and it completely lacks multichannel preamp outs.
A bigger problem, though, is its Audyssey MultEQ XT room correction, which is simply not great. To step up to truly good room correction (a.k.a. MultEQ XT32), one needs to upgrade to the AVR-X3800H ($1699). That’s not as unfair a comparison as it might seem at first, when you consider that to make the comparison fairer, you really need to add the Dirac Bass Control upgrade to the TX-RZ30, which brings its total price up to $1498 (usually less when you consider street price).
Which receiver is right for you really depends on how much energy you want to invest in dialing in your system and how you want to go about it. Is your room impeccably treated, with bass traps and the right mix of absorption and diffusion? Then it probably doesn’t matter. Get whatever fits your budget. But if your room is less than perfect, you’ll want room correction to help.
If you’re the type who wants great results with minimal effort, the Denon might be your pick. Download the MultEQ app, move the mike around a bit, set a max filter frequency about two octaves above the Schroeder frequency of your room (or just 900 to 1000Hz if you don’t want to do the math), and you’re done. It’ll sound fantastic.
But if you’re really comfortable with room acoustics, understand how these DSP filters work, are willing to put in the effort, and don’t mind a much bigger time investment, I don’t think you could get the same results with MultEQ XT32 as you could with Dirac Live plus Bass Control. Those last few percentage points of performance that we often chase are within the capabilities of the Onkyo, but just not quite so with the Denon.
To reiterate: if you’re not willing to buy the Bass Control upgrade, I think XT32 will likely deliver better results with less effort. But Bass Control really is that substantial a game-changer in my experience, and I simply didn’t go into this review expecting it to be.
TL;DR: is the Onkyo TX-RZ30 worth the money?
Straight out of the box, I think the RZ30 is one of the most fascinating AVRs I’ve reviewed in ages. It’s not perfect, especially with regard to setup and its accompanying app. But what you get for the money is kinda wild. Full-bandwidth Dirac Live in a receiver that lists for $1200 and sells for $1100? I didn’t think we’d see the day anytime soon. It’s an incredible value.
Add the $299 Bass Control license and the value proposition changes dramatically—in the right direction. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that I’m advocating for a $300 license key. But I have to set my biases aside and admit that the results it gives are substantial. Assuming the RZ30 has enough power for your room (and if your room isn’t large and your speakers aren’t too inefficient, it probably does), and assuming you’re willing to put in the work of understanding what Dirac Bass Control does and how it does it, you can dial in results you probably wouldn’t have imagined possible in your room without the addition of significant physical acoustical treatments.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Loudspeakers: RSL CG3 and CG23; GoldenEar SuperSat 3
- Subwoofer: RSL Speedwoofer 10S
- Sources: Roku Ultra 4802R; iPhone 12 Pro Max; Oppo UDP-205 4K Ultra HD Audiophile Blu-ray Disc player
- Speaker cables: Monoprice Choice Series 12AWG
- Power conditioner: SurgeX SX-AX15E
Onkyo TX-RZ30 A/V receiver
Price: $1199; $1498 as reviewed with Dirac Live Bass Control
Warranty: Two years, parts and labor
11 Trading Company, LLC
3502 Woodview Trace #200
Indianapolis, IN 46268
Phone: 1-800-229-1687
Website: onkyo.com
