Onkyo TX-SR605 (black)

Pros: Price! User friendly. Great sound. Perfect 1080P throughput.

Cons: Owners Manual could have been a better product, but unit is so easy once you "get into it", I guess it didn't have to be.

Summary: Purchased as the heart of my living room HD upgrade. Inputs are through an XBOX 360 (composite video cable and R/W RCA for sound), Direct TV HDDVR (HDMI), PS3 (HDMI). Outputs are to a Sharp LC46D92U (HDMI) and Klipsch RSX-5's up front, RCX-4 center, RSX-4's rear and a KSW-10 sub (14 AWG spkr wire). On inital setup the owners manual leaves a bit to be desired. With the HDMI out to the TV hooked up, there was no inital on-screen menu to work with. I thought the unit was a DOA! Following a comprehensive reading, I found the display on the unit itself the key to switching the output to the HDMI. Violia, up came a simple menu to select inputs, lables, outputs and just about any other function the unit was capable of. One plug in of the remote mic brings up the Audyssey auto speaker calibration. What a great feature! All the guesswork of the surround balancing was taken care of! Time to test.. All switching worked as advertised and I saw no signal degradation with Bluray playing through PS3. HD Direct TV looked incredible too. HDDVR has selectable resolutions and formats that all functioned through the A/V reciever. The Xbox comes up in 780P with 2D sound due to RCA audio hookups (which the reciever found automatically) and plays fine. Remote lacks full backlight, but is very easy to function and was easily programed to operate the basic functions of the TV, HDDVR and PS3. There's tons of functions yet to be explored and I need to test the audio decoding capability and HDMI upscaling a bit more, but currently I'm very pleased with the performance of this unit. Don't shy away from the 90 Watt power rating. Unless your trying to fill a barn with sound, this one's got plenty of power. Previous rater may have missed a selectable upconverting option in the units menu. If i've read it right, he should be able to select if he wants the A/V reciver to upconvert or just throughput.