Don: Actually I wouldn't be surprised at all, if EMI-related regulations would have also become more strict in the rest of the world in the meantime. I mean, sure, Europe has already been pretty densely populated for a pretty long time, but it's not the only densely populated area in the world, and even if one looks at countries, which aren't that densely populated on the whole, one will usually notice, that the majorities of the populations today will typically concentrate in and around major cities. Combine that with the huge number of pieces of consumer electronics, that people nowadays tend to have and use, and even more so, with how much more of that stuff may radiate on all sorts of frequencies compared to older electric and electronic equipment, and it would seem no wonder, that there also is a need for more EMI blocking in the rest of the world.
And of course that doesn't only apply to blocking interference of other stuff on our hifi equipment, but also to blocking interference of our hifi equipment on the other stuff, if one considers, how hifi equipment has changed. I mean, just look for example at a classic stereo integrated amp or receiver compared to a current model, which may not only sport microprocessor control, but also a DAC section as well as Ethernet, WLAN & Bluetooth and quite possibly also a USB port - and in addition it might even make use of a switched-mode power supply instead of a conventional one.
Hence I'm not surprised at all to see pretty massive EMI blocking not limited to European model variants any longer. And that Onkyo definitely isn't the only example for that trend. However, some other manufacturers like for example Marantz in the meantime would seem to rather apply combinations of capacitve and inductive blocking in order to avoid all too excessice capacitive blocking on their phono inputs.
Greetings from Munich!
Manfred / lini
