I bought an HK 630 from Dave & co. when I got my 340 mains and center (in the fall of last year) and unfortunately(!!), it looks to be dead at this point. Yesterday, during routine operation (my kids were watching a movie via HTPC, audio connected to the 630 via optical) the unit just kicked off. My first thought was overheating (though I wasn't driving it hard at all, it was a little warmer out than it had been and the unit is kept behind plexiglass in an entertainment center with an open rear), so I let it cool down a bit, turned it back on and it seemed to operate fine... until today. Once again, the unit shut off during routine operation. But this time, after killing the main power switch, letting it sit for a bit and then turning it back on, it immediately cut off and went back into standby. So this time I checked for shorts with the speaker wires (none), tested the plug in another outlet, reset the processor, and finally took it off the rack and removed absolutely every wire attached to it. Nothing helped. The receiver simply won't retain power for more than a split second before reverting to standby. Just to be clear -- there have been no electrical storms or outages, it has always been plugged into a decent surge protector, and I have never driven it hard at all (never turned it above -25, actually).

The truly weird and downright frustrating thing about all this is that the exact same thing happened to an refurbed HK 3475 (stereo) receiver that my mother and I purchased for my father for Christmas after finally convincing him to jump into quality components. I ended up having to drive nearly an hour each way to a repair shop and wait 5 weeks for the repair to get that one back to my father. Needless to say, our experience, coupled with some other horror stories (and at least one exact duplicate of my current situation posted of AVS) that I've read about on the web, does not speak well for for HK's quality control. I have definitely enjoyed the sound of the 630 when combined with the Ascends, but I am truly bummed out by the outcome of my first foray into "quality" hi-fi.

The one bright spot in all of this is that when I hooked up my 10-yr.-old low end Denon (AVR900) to the Ascends, they still sounded great!! Certainly not as rich or clean as with the HK, but not bad, not bad. Now that's a sign of a quality speaker...