AV Receiver Reviews

Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value

Like My Tattoo?

Once, tattoos were restricted to dock workers and people in dubious professions. Now they’re mainstream: You practically can’t be a musician, actor, or accountant without one. Why? Scientists are baffled. Maybe the bodyart lobby put something in the drinking water. In any case, the Integra DTR-50.2 is as tattooed as any rock star. I counted 11 logos on the front panel, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Just as many people add more tattoos on, um, intimate parts of the body, this AVR’s Webpage boasts a total of 27. True, some of them are small change: Do we really need logos for USB and Zone 3? But this AVR’s cornucopia is fairly bursting with meaningful logos from THX, Audyssey, and—my new favorite—Slacker.

You may recall that I've usually tried to dip into the historical well when introducing the many international audio systems that we've reviewed lately. This at least spares you from yet another opening paragraph of worn-out exaggerations about paradigm shifts and in-your-face phrases like "in your face." I'm somewhat stumped here, though. The Japanese and English seem to have avoided pairing up, or squaring off (directly, at least), in any high-profile military conflicts. There have really been no economic or cultural wars between them. I can't even find a case where they've faced off in a major sporting event. But one place they have gotten together often is in the listening room—and I suppose that is what we're here for, after all.

If you sometimes get nostalgic for the days of 2-channel audio, you're not alone. Life was simple then. You plugged your CD player in here, your turntable in there, hooked up the preamp to the power amp (unless you were a hair-shirt audiophile with an all-in-one integrated amp) and you were done. Select the source, adjust the volume, sit back, and listen.

At some point in the evolution of home theater, someone noticed that the phrase includes the word home. At that point, weird and wonderful things began to happen. Speakers morphed into smaller, more rounded, and occasionally more imaginative shapes. The surround receivers that fed them maintained their black-box identities but moved discreetly into closets. Back panels began to sprout extra jacks, the better to interact with touchscreen interfaces, second zones, and other niceties that have become staples of the connected home.

KEF's KHT5005.2 speaker system and Onkyo's TX-SR674 surround receiver are an odd couple. The KEF speakers are slim, tubular, and chic, the latest thing in décor-friendly sub/sat sets. And the Onkyo receiver? It couldn't be more conventional, conservative, even conformist. It's a plain black box with a very good features set for the price. But could it be that the two complement one another? Could this, in fact, turn into a long-term relationship?

Kenwood's entry in the category of top-shelf A/V receivers is the Sovereign VR-5900—a curvaceous, feature-packed powerhouse combining a user-friendly operating system, THX Ultra certification with all attendant processing facilities, Dolby Digital EX, matrixed and discrete DTS ES, HDCD decoding, and enough digital and analog inputs and outputs (including 2-zone operation) to satisfy almost any videophile's needs. It even includes a moving-magnet phono stage (but laserdisc aficionados will have to add an outboard RF demodulator).

That last cell phone you bought—the one with the nearly telephone book-sized instruction manual—did you take the time to read through the tome completely, learning every function and programming feature before using it to actually make phone calls? Products are becoming so over-engineered and laden with features and functions, most of us merely skim the surface of the ones we buy, often remaining content with just getting the thing to actually function as intended.