Uploaded May 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Well, summer will be here soon. Which is one more reason to listen to great music loudly. And if it’s the way I like it, it’s going to be a little bit inaccurate with some equalizer added, obnoxious pressboard party speakers and a result that probably varies quite a bit from how the music originally was actually intended to sound. But that’s what makes us all so special and unique, right?
A friend of mine tipped me off to this receiver, the Kenwood KR-V9020. This is from the 1990/1991 model line and he had the sister model in high school and I vaguely remember it.
I truly think it’s the tail end for Kenwood receivers with a lot of buttons and the big VFD display. 130WPC, discrete transistors, many inputs, and a fair amount of buttons that allow you to do everything you want to do. The bouncing spectrum analyzer is the icing on the cake. A year or two later, Kenwood would have a similar receiver, but without the display and the buttons, and if you lost the remote, you’d be crippled to perform many of the functions.
So I had put this model on my eBay watchlist and ironically ran into it at a pawn shop in Michigan City, Indiana last weekend. It just happened to be there along with a bunch of other newer receivers.
“Who wants this old thing” I somewhat eluded to, and talked the clerk down a day later for one crisp bill, and I had it in my hands without a receipt. That’s the way of the working world isn’t it?
Anyways, as I do with all newly acquired equipment, I downloaded the service manual off of Hifi Engine amd a re-biased it. It was only a little off. Quite a powerful unit and was very clean inside. Just a quick vacuum and some dioxit on two potentiometers.
Well, summer will be here soon. Which is one more reason to listen to great music loudly. And if it’s the way I like it, it’s going to be a little bit inaccurate with some equalizer added, obnoxious pressboard party speakers and a result that probably varies quite a bit from how the music originally was actually intended to sound. But that’s what makes us all so special and unique, right?
A friend of mine tipped me off to this receiver, the Kenwood KR-V9020. This is from the 1990/1991 model line and he had the sister model in high school and I vaguely remember it.
I truly think it’s the tail end for Kenwood receivers with a lot of buttons and the big VFD display. 130WPC, discrete transistors, many inputs, and a fair amount of buttons that allow you to do everything you want to do. The bouncing spectrum analyzer is the icing on the cake. A year or two later, Kenwood would have a similar receiver, but without the display and the buttons, and if you lost the remote, you’d be crippled to perform many of the functions.
So I had put this model on my eBay watchlist and ironically ran into it at a pawn shop in Michigan City, Indiana last weekend. It just happened to be there along with a bunch of other newer receivers.
“Who wants this old thing” I somewhat eluded to, and talked the clerk down a day later for one crisp bill, and I had it in my hands without a receipt. That’s the way of the working world isn’t it?
Anyways, as I do with all newly acquired equipment, I downloaded the service manual off of Hifi Engine amd a re-biased it. It was only a little off. Quite a powerful unit and was very clean inside. Just a quick vacuum and some dioxit on two potentiometers.
