Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you had to own the C-7030 for one year, minimum, in order to leave a review, you'd see a different pattern of customer reaction emerging. Few people even realize there is a One Year Club, not that anyone in their right mind would want to be a member, but buy one of these players and you're entered in the raffle, like it or not. I was aware of the horror stories - that Onkyo components seem almost-diabolically designed to drop dead five minutes after the warranty expires; but the rave reviews for this particular cd player's audio output made me take the gamble. Bought it Oct 2016. And for most of that first year, though this was used very lightly, only a very few problems emerged - mostly the player not being able to read/recognize some discs (which should have rang alarm bells in my head, but happened so infrequently I dismissed it). And sure enough - here it is Dec 2017, two months past the warranty, and now the player skips (constantly), stops reading mid-disc (constantly), won't read/play discs at all (constantly.....say, are you detecting a pattern here?) Let the record show that all these discs have subsequently played perfectly well in a variety of other players - older units, car audio players, my computer's media-writer..... boomboxes for god's sake! Now, if you should find yourself in similar straits - as is likely, given this unit's popularity (the price is great and the initial reviews are wildly enthusiastic) - let me save you some time and tsuris: is the unit *just* past the warranty date? Then those annoying glitches you've been recently experiencing whenever you try to play a disc are neither minor nor temporary - you got BEAT. Yes, it's nice they sprang for spiffy DACs, but if the laser-tracking is shoddy and substandard...and it is....then those DACs are useless. So you might as well suck it up, write off the cost of the unit and make up your mind to buy yourself a different player right now. My C-7030 is in pristine condition and was never treated with less than tender affection, and it's as good as dead less than two months past warranty. I got my membership card for the One Year Club. Really your best bet for minimum aggravation is if the unit begins failing, or dies altogether, within the 30 days that Amazon guarantees your purchase: they'll refund your purchase, issue you a call-tag, and pick up both the item and the cost of return-shipping. I believe Onkyo's warranty means you ship to their repair center on *your* dime, and wait 4-6 weeks to get a refurbished item sent to you in return. And as for wretches like myself - new members of the One Year Club - it's either lug it somewhere to have it repaired, or toss it and start shopping for a replacement. I'm not sure of my next move but I can assure you of one thing - the only "feature" that means a damn thing to me at this point is reliability. I'll settle for more prosaic sound if it means the damn thing will play cds without issue for 5 or 10 years.