Onkyo TX-SR605

[ music ] ^M00:00:11 >> I'm John Falcone, senior editor at CNET.com and this is the Onkyo TX-SR605. Now this model's actually towards the bottom of Onkyo's 2007 line up and it looks just like an average, any average AV receiver we've seen over the past several years. It's a 7.1 channel model, it decodes all your standard Dolby and DTS modes. It can switch between a variety of audio and video components in your home theater system. But, this model does so much more than anything we've seen up to this point. It's really kind of astounding. It has all the good stuff like automated speaker calibration, you just set up the microphone at three points in the room and it automatically calibrates this, the sound and speaker levels for your particular room. It has both satellite services on board. So you just need to add the relevent accessories and subscriptions for either Sirrius or XM and you're good to go. More importanly, this is fully HDMI 1.3 compliant. It has two HDMI inputs, one output and it also auto converts any of the other video inputs, component, composit, S video, up to HDMI and outputs that via one single cable to your TV. It also has support for decoding the next generation audio formats such as Dolby True HD and DDT HD Master Audio. This AV receiver is so advanced and so new that it's very future proof. The only real drawback we found with this model was that we wish of course it had more HDMI ports than it's current two and we also wish the video transcoding from analog to digital was a little bit better. However, for the price, this is just packing an amazing amount of value and features into the box and it's an easy recommendation and that's why we're giving it an editor's choice. I'm John Falcone for CNET and this is the Onkyo TX-SR605. [ music ] ^M00:02:31