Why You Should Own a Home Theater Receiver

Hi everybody!

Today I thought I would talk about the benefits of a good home theater receiver. These days, companies are focusing more on all in one media hubs for your home. Some of the best examples are the current video game consoles. Both the Xbox 360, and the Playstation 3 are great examples of machines that can stream music and videos from your PC, play video games, and play movies all on your TV.

A home theater receiver is the heart of any decent quality home theater surround sound audio system. Home theater receivers perform many important duties as the central hub of your home theater. Once properly connected to the rest of your audio/video home theater components and home theater speakers, an AV receiver makes it convenient to switch between your audio and video input sources at the mere push of a button or turn of a knob. The receiver can also expand the amount of equipment you can connect to you TV by making it possible to connect everything to the receiver, and then only running 1 connection to the TV. This also makes it much easier to hide the jumble of wires from all of your system components such as your video game consoles, DVD players, and cable boxes.

In addition to A/V switching, a home theater receiver also has built-in surround sound processing whose job is to decode the multi-channel digital surround sound audio soundtracks from Blu-ray Discs, HD DVD discs, DVDs, HD receivers, etc. This means that you will be able to enjoy the new high definition audio codec’s like Dolby True HD, and DTS MA giving you a much more movie theater like sound in your home when watching movies.

Lastly, a receiver includes a built-in AM/FM radio tuner, usually with dozens of radio station presets. Many receivers today are also XM or Sirius satellite radio ready, or Internet radio ready, which means (with additional optional hardware and subscription to service) you’ll be able to enjoy unlimited digital radio programming.

The items listed above are just basic reasons for getting a home theater receiver. Tomorrow, I’ll give you advice on what to look for in a home theater system, and on Friday I’ll list what I think the top receivers for a first time buyer are.