kahunaburger

The new home needs some earth-shaking sound as well. My old Denon AVR-3801 did a good job over the last few years and I never had any problems with it. When I disconnected the equipment in the old house and saw the 500 ft. of cables behind the receiver, I pledged to end that situation and upgrade the home theater receiver as well. I’m dreaming of HDMI-cables in and one HDMI-cable out - ahhh!

The last few days were spent on honing in on a new model. Denon has a good reputation and given my past experience, I was tempted to make the next one a Denon again. The most attractive model was the AVR-4806CI (pictured below). It had everything that I was looking for, especially the three HDMI inputs and the 1080p-supporting HDMI monitor output. The least attractive thing was it’s price (around $4K MSRP - ouch!).

So I continued to shop around and see if I could get something similar at a reduced price. This morning, while the little baby was still sleeping (around 5am), I cruised on the web and stumbled over Onkyo’s TX-SR805 (again pictured below). It’s in the brand-new category (released June 2007) and it packs a heck of a lot of features into the box without breaking the bank (MSRP seems to be below $1k). Granted, it misses some of the stuff the Denon above has (Internet Radio for example, but that is easily replaced by the existing Apple Airport Express setup), but overall the feature-set is pretty much on par. However, it does have one advantage over the Denon and that is support for HDMI v1.3a (as opposed to v1.1). Talking to some home theater experts in town, I hear that HDMI version mismatches causes some of the biggest headaches and given that 1.3a is much newer than 1.1, one can expect less problems in this area.

The Onkyo is on it’s way to my home and tomorrow morning the electrcians will show up to put up the wires for the surrond and surrond-back speakers. 7.1 - here I come.

Now I only need to find time to actually watch some movies …