Onkyo TX-SR705 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black)

For a receiver at this price, this unit packs a lot of features and punch. I connected it to a PS3, HD Sat and a DVD player progressive 1080. It works just fine with 3 HDMI connectors. Easy to set up. Good buy for your money

The Onkyo SR705 Surround Sound Receiver is excellent. It produces clear crisp sound and a really nice surround system. I have Infinity Center, Right and Left Speakers, Advent Rear Speakers, and a 12 inch Powered Cerwin Vega Sub-Woofer. You feel like you are right there... in a theatre, at a concert or whatever. This works very well in combination with my Samsund 67 inch DLP 1080P TV. My components all go through my SR705 and are controlled uiversally via its remote control.. thus one HDMI input from the SR705 to the TV. I love it all.

I've only had this receiver for a month. My impression so far has been ok. It seems to have a lot of features, some of which I will never use. The unit feels pretty hefty on the side of the power supply and seems well constructed overall.

When hooking up all the cables, I noticed the speaker binding posts seem a bit flimsy compared to those on my 9-yr-old Yamaha. But not a big deal. A lot of identical looking I/O ports in the back, so hooking everything up without directly looking at them in good lighting is difficult. This is a common problem with all A/V receivers. After all the cables are in place, it took me a while to figure out how to properly assign the various input ports and how to configure the speakers. The menu interface is not intuitive, and the instruction manual is cryptic and useless.

The sound quality is satisfactory to my ears, but not noticably better than my old Yamaha. One exception is the LFE. Bass coming out of that channel is sigificantly softer at 0dB compared to my old receiver. Even with the low pass filter set at 90Hz, I had to turn up LFE by +4dB and crank up the gain on the sub to 12 o'clock to compensate for the lack of bass, when listening to stereo music CD's or watching drama movie DVD's. But when playing action oriented films, like Star Wars on DVD or Cars on Bluray, I have to turn down the bass. It's very annoying to have to constantly play with the bass level when switching sources, whereas with my old receiver, I just set it once (-3dB) and never had to worry about it again.

Another weird thing is that I really have to crank up the volume on the receiver (above -10dB) to get decent loudness. I think the max is only +18dB (but it can be turned down to <-60dB in the other direction, which is ridiculous). I'm definitely not a loudness freak. With my old receiver (rated at 75w/ch), I never had to turn the volume knob beyond 10 o'clock. For a receiver rated at 100w/ch (my speakers are 8ohms), it doesn't seem to have a lot of power.

This actually made my speakers sound better. I had an old Yamaha to replace and im so glad i did. Was able to get it for 499 from amazon. Make sure you have a descent set of speakers or otherwise you will not get the full joy and experience. This upgrade has now made me look into moving from 5.1 to a 7.1 setup, im so excited. Do not hold back on this, you will not be disapointed!

Had this new receiver a month now and am very happy with it, will take a while to figure out all the bells and whistles but overall am satisfied with the functions and remote control setup. Sounds silly, but the only gripe would be too many choices for the listening mode , slowly figuring out the best mode for each piece of equipment and application.