Deciding between an older stereo and av receiver

Hi all,

For years I've used my trusty Yamaha rx-395 stereo receiver (1995 era) for its phono stage and headphone section with my LPs. It's always worked properly and beats the heck out of every other regular cheap modern stage I've tried. So when my dad started getting back into hifi and asked for my help I naturally started looking for a similar Yamaha receiver.

What I found was a cheap and virtually mint looking Rxv-590, which is about the same era but a midrange model of their earliest av multichannel receivers in the 90's. This means it looks virtually identical to the 395 but with far more features and inputs as this is a prolgic capable multichannel receiver with more power as well. It even has multichannel rca ins for 5.1.

I had always had the assumption that stereo units were better than multichannel units for regular stereo but after comparing gear for a while it seems the 590 actually has more power and a slightly different/clearer sound to it.

Now I can't make up my mind which to keep and which to pass on. Has anyone had similar experiences?

 

used to owned a Yamaha AV receiver which was used for home theatre, i tried playing music concert DVD and audio CDs on it and found the sound too bright and harsh for my ears. its fine with movies though. for stereo setup, its better to get a integrated amp rather than a AV receiver as the former is a dedicated 2 channel design while an AV receiver the resources are spread over mutli channel, 5.1 to start, typically speaking.