Greetings, I'm a novice in the A/V world but hungry for knowledge.
Currently I am an owner of an Onkyo TX-SR806 receiver and love it. Soon I will be looking to buy a new receiver and plan on getting something slightly better than my current receiver.
Being new to the A/V world I have some questions on whether any high end receivers support some features I am about to list.
I'm not expecting any one receiver to have all these features, but I am looking for suggestions. I am going to ask about 5 features.
1. More than 4 selectable video sources
2. More accessible equalizer
3. Output to multiple tvs with two different sources simultaneously
LESS IMPORTANTLY
4. 9.2 or above channels
5. independent audio and video (be able to select the video from one source and the audio from another)
Let's get started.
1.)
Firstly, I have a lot of sources to plug in, and from what I can tell the TX-SR806 only allows me 4 selectable video sources at a time
They are labeled DVD, VCR/DVR, CBL/SAT, and GAME/TV
there are also several additional audio only channels, but that doesn't help me much with additional video channels. What receivers out there would you recommend with more selectable video sources?
2.)
Secondly, I was wondering what receivers out there have quick access to adjusting your speaker balance, for example, raising bass, rear channels, front channels, independently.
I can always open up my menu and go through a level or two of menu and adjust each speaker output there, but this is very cumbersome and time consuming both to set and reset.
It'd be nice if there was a way to adjust these things from the remote without any menus, and also a "level reset" button.
I had this on a very cheap speaker system before and was surprised that more expensive receivers don't have this option. Am I simply out of luck? I know most people would say it is ideal to calibrate these to a reference setting and then NOT change them, but sometimes I like to turn up my rear or base levels.
3.)
Thirdly it would be nice to be able to output to 2 different tvs at once. I have my receiver outputting hdmi to my main screen right now, but when I tried to output composite to an old tv so my brother could do something while I used the main screen it wouldn't output to the second screen. I'll also note that it would need to be able to be outputting two DIFFERENT sources, because outputting the same source on both screens would kind of defeat the purpose.
4.)
This request is much less important than the previous requests, but I have recently discovered the new Dolby Pro Logic IIz technology, I understand it's not exactly new and Yamaha has had hight channels for years. I also understand that for watching movies this is pretty unnecessary and gimmicky. However, I am a very avid gamer, and this is something I would value in games designed to use it very much.
I was wondering if there are any reasonably priced receivers out there with 9.2 channel support or greater, I'd love to get another sub, and also try out the new hight channels, but I don't really want to lose 2 of my rear channels.
5.)
One thing I can already do with my receiver, is play a video source, like my xbox 360, and then I can have my CD player, or radio play audio while I use my xbox 360 video, this was great, I was just curious if there was any receiver where your video and audio signals were independent, so I could have xbox 360 video with Xbox 360 audio, OR I could have it with Playstation 3 audio.
CONCLUSSION
In conclusion, I am just looking for examples that meet at least one of these criterion, I don't expect there to be a magical receiver with all the solutions, but I am just looking for options. I also would like to keep my Dolby True HD, and DTS Master Audio capabilities, and keep some legacy inputs too, I'm not ready for HDMI only just yet
If you have any other cool receiver features that you are looking for you can also post in this thread, I'm sure there are great features I would appreciate that I haven't heard of or thought of yet.
Thank you for your time.
