I think I understand the basis of BeethovenRocks' argument, and I agree with the concept. When you look at very inexpensive receivers (or DVD players, or whatever other mass produced product you want to name), there is a point where the low cost comes at the expense of good design, construction, and quality control - units that quite simply don't work the way they should. As you move up the price tag food chain, the overall quality level will typically also improve. (There are cases where the overall quality does not improve but the added price is due to effective marketing - the Bose Acoustimass speaker systems spring quickly to mind - but we'll let those be the exceptions that help prove the rule.) At some (impossible to define) price point, you should reach a point of rapidly dimishing return.

Look at the DVD player market, for example. There are a number of manufacturers (almost to the point of being countless, it seems like sometimes) making very inexpensive players. In theory, they all play discs the same way. At the bottom end of the price range, however, you have a significantly higher percentage of players that exhibit incompatibility with complex discs, players with unacceptably high failure rates, and players with shorter life spans. A $79 DVD player may be able to provide as good a picture on a standard definition TV as a $900 DVD player. On the other hand, the $79 player is also more likely to not work when you first take it out of the box, to simply die for no reason after fairly little use, or to have some other unfortunate design weakness.

With surround sound processors, you have a somewhat different environment. When the Model 950 was still available, it was the least expensive SSP on the market that I was aware of (looking solely at "new from the manufacturer" products). Later this year, AV123's LMC-1 will probably take over that title (at the same price point that the 950 had at the end of its production run). Because of the smaller and more demanding market for SSP's, there has not (and likely never will be) a "$99" bracket where the product "worked" but was clearly identifiable as "cheap" to the point of almost not working, so we've always been looking at a market where we focus on much more relative subtleties.