Onkyo TX-SR606

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02 >> Hi, I'm Matthew Moskoviciak, senior associate editor at cnet.com, and this is the Onkyo TX SR606 AV receiver. Now this is an update to last year's editor's choice award-winning 605 AV receiver, and Onkyo's actually managed to make a good product even better. Now, check out the design. It's pretty standard. AV receivers don't generally look that great. Now one thing they did change that we did like in terms of the design is the remote. Now the remote is much simplified compare to the other one. It has a lot less buttons and it's more reliant on using the directional pad to go through menus. Another big upgrade on this receiver is its connectivity. If you look around back there are actually four HTMI inputs, which is two more than it had last year, and that's great because pretty much everyone, even the biggest high def fans, should be served by the HTMI inputs. There are also two component video inputs, which is a little bit of a step down. We prefer to have three. And there are plenty of other standard def and standard digital audio inputs. Like last year's 605, this also has onboard decoding for both Dolby True HD, and DTSH master audio. And the video performance overall wasn't that impressive. For HTMI up conversion we were pretty disappointed by how up-converted analog signals look. There were a lot of added jaggies, and we actually saw some black bars on the top left and bottom of the screen that were added by the receiver. Now, on the other hand, we were impressed by the sound quality. Overall, it sounded really good on both movies and music. We did find that we tended to like the sound on movies a little bit more than music, but for this price range it was very impressive. This is a great upgrade over last year's receiver, and still an excellent value overall. I'm Matthew Moskoviciak, and this is the Onkyo TX SR606. ^M00:01:56 [ Music ]