I definetly think that the Panasonic and JVC lineups offer great value, and very few products compare to them in their price range. I have two Panasonic SA-XR10's, actually I gave one of them to my parents along with my old set of Infinity RS4's. For a straight stereo setup, I prefer my old Pioneer SX-1010 over the XR10. I did about as close to a test setup as possible: I had both driving the left channel only, and had my two Omni260's right next to each other hooked up to the left channels of each receiver. My source was an Echo Layla 24/96, a nice pro-level sound card. I even gave the advantage to the XR10 by using the digital out on the Layla for the XR10, and the Layla's analog out on the SX-1010. Side-by-side, the 1010 sounded better. The biggest difference was that the xr10 was harsher with vocalists; a hard "S" sound from vocalists when they spoke "S" words. I couldn't test soundstage, as each only had one speaker.
To be fair though, my sx-1010 is not stock, after all it is 30 years old now! This year I replaced all capacitors inside it, added a soft start, upgraded bias pots, upgraded volume pot to blue velvet pot, and replaced the two large P/S caps with Nichicon KG's (2x22,000). It's a linear power, all discrete design of the golden era of receivers, and sounds glorious to me. The fact that the XR10 sounded similar to the 1010 is a testament to the quality/performance of Panasonic's lineup. If the 1010 wasn't given to me , I would have modified the XR10 in a heartbeat. In fact, my original purpose for buying the XR10 was to compare it to my 1010, to see if it was as good as people claimed it to be. After comparing the two, I felt the XR10 was such a good value in sound, that I kept it and use it in my office now.
