What to Look For in a Home Theater Receiver

May 13, 2008 – 12:09 pm, posted by draiken78

Hi everybody!

Yesterday, I talked about some of the benefits of owning a home theater receiver. If you missed the article, it can be found at:

Why Should I Own a Home Theater Receiver?

So you already know that a home theater receiver provides:

• Switching for all of your home theater system’s audio and video components
• Surround sound decoding
• Signal processing for simulated sound fields and bass management
• Amplifies the audio signals to drive the loudspeakers and controls the playback volume
• Serves as an AM/FM radio tuner

Today, I’m going to talk about how to go about looking for a receiver for your entertainment center that will fit your needs. As always, this is a beginner’s guide so I will try to stick to the things the average consumer should care about. However, this is a little more complicated, because what you want or need depends on what kind of components you have (i.e.: DVD player, Blu-Ray player, etc).

If You Own a Blu-Ray Player

If you own a Blu-Ray player, or plan to purchase one in the future there are certain things to look for if you are the average consumer. The first thing you need to find out is whether or not your Blu-Ray player passes the audio via bit streaming (i.e.: your receiver decodes the audio, not the Blu-Ray player), or if the player outputs the audio via PMC or LPCM (i.e.: your player decodes the audio, not the receiver). 2 of the more popular player for example both send the audio differently.

The Playstation 3 transmits audio via LPCM. So you only need a receiver that can accept LPCM from the player. This gives you a huge list of receivers to choose from, as well as allows you to choose from the less expensive receiver models. In order to receive the high definition audio codes, you must connect your player to your receiver with a HDMI cable. The only other thing you need to check on the receiver is whether it has 5.1 channel surround sound, or 7.1 channel surround sound. That selection is your choice, depending on how many speakers you want to have.

The Panasonic DMP-BD30 and DMP-BD50 players pass audio via bit streaming. In order to get the new High definition audio from these players there are a few more requirements. In order to receive the new high definition audio with these players you not only need to use a HDMI cable, but the receiver must be able to process and decode the HD audio formats. Another added requirement is that the receiver must have the more expensive HDMI 1.3 inputs on it. There are far fewer receivers capable of meeting these requirements at a reasonable price at the moment; however the new line of Onkyo receivers being released soon may fit the description.

What Else Do I Look For?

To be honest, if you are the average consumer there isn’t really anything else you need to worry about. Make sure that the receiver actually takes the audio and plays it on the speakers rather than the dreaded video pass-through some companies try to dupe you into. If the receiver is simply video pass-through, it acts like a middle man between your player and TV. Rather than passing the picture on to the TV and playing the audio through your receiver, it passes both audio and video to the TV making your receiver unable to play the HD audio.

The last thing to look for is simply the number and type of connections you need it to have on the back. For instance, I own an Xbox 360, HD DVD player, PS3, and an HD satellite box. Each one of these can use HDMI so I needed to be able to connect 4 HDMI cables. A receiver like that was out of my price range, so I got an Onkyo TX-SR 705 which has 3 HDMI inputs, and got 1 automatic switch that my PS3 and Xbox 360 share.

I hope you all found this article helpful! Friday, I’ll let you know what I’ve found to be among the best receivers on the market.