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Date: 2007-01-11 great system for a good price This system has a great amount of features for a good price. Setup is easy with the included microphone for sound calibration. Everything plugs in and plays with a minimum of setup. More importantly it sounds great. Different speaker settings can be selected for different inputs to easily fine tune settings for movies or music. I've used both the optical and analog inputs and all sound good. The only thing I haven't tried is the HDMI pass-through since I don't have an HDTV yet. This comes with enough speaker cable to wire a medium sized room but if you are covering a lot of space you may want longer wires. My only beef is the slightly unintuitive nature of the menus; but that is a minor concern. Once you read the manual you can easily change any setting you want. Altogether I think this is the best sounding, most feature rich system at its price point. It sounds good and doesn't have any major annoyances. Date: 2007-01-11 Sounds too good to be true... and it is. Pro's: * The receiver has a very nice feature set, particularly considering the pricerange. HDMI switching is very useful. * Adequate power for a small - midsize room (for reference, my living room is 17' x 17'). Con's: * Receiver doesn't decode audio information from HDMI signal, making it necessary to run Optical or Digital Coax to transmit the audio signal. * No analog --> digital conversion, but that's to be expected in this pricerange. * Included speakers are absolute garbage, they sound TERRIBLE. Seriously. I threw them all away less than a week after receiving this product. Other thoughts: * Plan on replacing the stock speakers (I went with a set from Polk, on sale for $250). * Don't be fooled by the "900" watt power rating. They're 140w x 5 @ 1KHz into 6 Ohms... which means that their actual (estimated) full range rating is probably closer to 70-80w x 5 @ 20Hz-20KHz into 8 Ohms. * Bottom line - spend a couple hundred more and get a nicer system. Yamaha makes a pretty good product for around $500. Date: 2007-01-10 An affordable, robust sound system Although I'm no audiophile, this system sounds great. The auto-setup function made calibrating the speakers a five-minute breeze. Even though the manual is quite thick and laid out in a hard-to-read and confusing manner, setting up the inputs to all of my devices only took about half-an-hour (that is NOT counting the two hours I spent trying to decipher the manual. You could probably figure out how to set up the inputs by just skipping to the manual sections that cover them). The reason why this only gets four stars is because, apparently, "HDMI Passthrough" means that the sound signal isn't leeched from the HDMI cable before it gets passed on to your TV. This means that for each HDMI cable you run from your sound source to your receiver, you must also run either an optical audio cable or a digital audio cable from that source to the receiver. And since there are two HDMI inputs, both optical audio inputs will be taken up with their accompanying sound signals. There is also one digital audio input. In total, you can only have three 5.1 surround sound signals connected at once. It should be noted that this receiver cannot convert digital video to audio and vice-versa (so if you have video coming into the receiver via a component video input and one HDMI cable going from the receiver to your television, then that video will NOT be passed to your TV through the HDMI cable). My inputs consist of three devices: 1) A Sony DVPNC85H/B 5-Disc DVD player (which is a perfect complement to this receiver since it outputs its upconverted signal over HDMI and the receiver remote works for this device, too) is connected via HDMI and its included digital audio cable. 2) A Motorola HD DVR cable box (from Comcast) connected via HDMI and an optical audio cable. 3) An Xbox 360 connected via an optical audio cable (the component cables are connected directly to the TV since I don't need to switch between component video devices). Each audio output can be manually paired with a video output and assigned to a configuration button. These buttons are on the remote and allow you to switch both audio and video inputs at the same time. So, for instance, if "Input 1" is set up to switch to your cable box (suppose it's connected like mine), then pressing the "Input 1" button will switch to the cable box's HDMI input and to its optical audio input. As with many complete surround sound system packages, you will likely have to buy extra speaker wire since the included wires are too short. Measure the path your wire will take from where the receiver will be to where the furthest rear speaker will be. You want both rear speakers to have the same length of wire, so the longest wire path should determine the length for both. Here's another tip: don't buy expensive HDMI cables. You can get them for about five or six bucks if you look around (try an Amazon search since one of their Marketplace stores has great prices). The differences between cheap and expensive HDMI cables is too small to warrant the price variance between the two. HDMI cables transmit digital information, and digital signals don't degrade like analog signals do. So, if you have three or fewer devices from which you want to output 5.1 audio, then buy this sound system. It's hundreds of dollars less than comparable systems. If you have more than three output devices, then you can either settle for this and use a separate optical audio switch, or upi can shell out two or three times as much for a receiver with extra audio inputs AND HDMI inputs. Date: 2007-01-10 Great price, plenty of customization We were looking for something to accomodate our new 42" plasma tv. This was a great deal and was at the top of the list on Consumer Reports. It was also said to cost another $75-100. You can always find it cheaper on Amazon though. I set it up with the speaker that is self-configuring. Afterwards I did a litlle tweaking myself but not much. This has great dolby 5.1 and can even synth stereo surround sound to those not so great local channels too. All around a great buy. Date: 2007-01-09 Almost completely satisfied - needed better wires As the title suggests, the very thin speaker cables provided would be a limitation, but one I was prepared for. I bought Monster cable MC 10/10 cables with angled pins for better sound, pretty cheap for their brand, but far, far better than what was supplied. These were for the front and center speakers. Love the auto-calibration mic part. I use this system in the bedroom. The small speakers don't get in the way of the TV, a Sharp 46" LCD. I anticipate using the HDMI for when I get a Blu-Ray player. * Price is subject to change. |
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