Price: $800 At A Glance: New rounded front panel is borrowed from higher-end gear • Audyssey MultEQ auto setup and room EQ • Audio circuits on separate circuit board
The Middle Kid Syndrome
As the third child in a series of four, I know what it’s like to be in between. My older siblings arrived a decade before I did and towered over me with their adult-like achievements. They had summer jobs, bought Volkswagen Beetles, headed off to college, and—most fatefully, I now recognize—turned me on to rock ’n’ roll. I was the pampered baby for a few years until my younger sibling arrived and, predictably, absorbed more of my mother’s time. This made me terribly jealous.
Price: $1,099 At A Glance: Onkyo’s first THX Ultra2 Plus–certified AVR • New THX and Audyssey algorithms • Five HDMI 1.3 inputs • Faroudja DCDi video
With Two Secret Sauces
When I compare the Onkyo TX-SR806 receiver with last year’s Onkyo crop, I see incremental but significant improvements. The most notable ones are licensed technologies from THX and Audyssey (more on them soon). But when I compare this product with the earliest A/V receivers (and in the process, look back on myself as I was then), I actually get dizzy.
If you're like me, you've seen your net worth take a significant hit in 2008. Not only has my house's value dropped nearly 30 percent, but my retirement fund dropped that much the first week of October! Consequently, I don't feel as wealthy as I did in 2007—although no one would ever confuse me with Daddy Warbucks in any event.
Price: $7,000 Highlights: Superb sound for both movies and music • 10 channels of powerful Class D amplification • Sets a steep learning curve but rewards with immense flexibility • Video processing has limitations, including no upconversion of HDMI sources
And the Kitchen Sink
Sometimes I get nostalgic for the early days of home theater. For example, I fondly remember the Proceed AVP processor I reviewed for Stereophile Guide to Home Theater in 1997. Conventional Dolby Digital and DTS were its most exotic operating modes, the remote had fewer than a dozen buttons, and it didn’t provide room equalization, extra surround modes, or onboard video processing. In fact, it didn’t have any video switching beyond S-video. We didn’t need no stinkin’ component, and no one had even heard of HDMI. Laserdisc was the most established source, DVD was brand new, and consumer high definition was still a mote in the FCC’s eye.
Price: $350 Highlights: Five channels times 105 watts • HDMI with high-resolution PCM • Includes Yamaha’s YPAO auto setup
Home Theater Out of the Box
Why would anyone buy a budget receiver and satellite/subwoofer speakers instead of a simpler home theater in a box system? To the uninitiated, the HTIB seems like a no-brainer. It spares the consumer the rigors of equipment matching and sometimes even throws in a disc drive.
What separates a good A/V receiver from a great one? The line has certainly blurred over the past few years, and you can find phenomenal values for under $2000 that offer many of the features once included only in the flagship models, minus a few bells and whistles.
The great thing about technol-ogy is that everything eventually becomes affordable. The latest generation of A/V receivers certainly demonstrates this, and the Onkyo TX-SR606 exemplifies the extraordinary features and performance capabilities of AVRs under $600.