Pioneer VSX-1018AH-K: First Look

[ Music ] ^M00:00:04 >>Hi, I'm Matthew Moskovciak, senior associate editor at cnet.com, and this is the Pioneer VSX 1018 AHK. This is a midrange AV receiver, and in its price class, it's actually pretty well featured. It features both Dolby true HD, and DTS HD master audio on board decoding. And if you flip it around back, you'll see there are three HDMI inputs. Now some of the competitors offer four, but three should be enough for most home theaters. You'll also see there's an HDMI output, and the Pioneer is capable of up converting analog signals to 10 ADP. The video quality on the up converted analog signals is decent, but it's not quite as good we saw on the Sony STRDG 920. Now if we go back around front, you'll see there's a USB port. And what's nice about this is you can actually plug in your iPod directly to it, and then navigate your music collection using the on screen display. Now you'll notice the on screen display uses pretty ugly, white blocky text compared to the graphical user interface that we saw on the Sony. Now while the menus on the Pioneer don't look that great, we did feel that the sound quality was a cut above some of the other receivers we've testing, particularly the competing Sony STRDG 920 and then navigae suld be enough for most home theaters. . Most people may not recognize the difference, but on music and movies, audio files will definitely prefer the Pioneer. Overall, with its solid sound quality and its excellent feature set, the Pioneer VSX 1018 AHK is one of the best values you'll find in the midrange AV receiver price class. I'm Matthew Moskovciak at cnet.com, and this is the Pioneer VSX 1018 AHK. ^M00:01:46 [ Music ]