Reviews of Home Theater Receivers.

Home Theater Receivers are the control center of your home theater system. Actually, think of them as the brains of your system. Often incorrectly referred to as stereo amplifiers the receiver is where all of the inputs come in, where the signals are processed, and where decisions are made. It's final function is its output. Audio and video. Throughout this page are the links to the reviews of home theater receivers in several different categories, and also by brand.

Every component you own now, and every component you will buy for your home theater system, inputs into the home theater receiver. You have a CD player? Plug it into the receiver. Cassette deck, turntable, VCR, TV, DVD player, satellite? They will all plug directly into the home theater receiver. It will control them all. For stereo applications (CD, VCR, etc.) it will route sound to two of your speakers for playback (stereo). For the DVD player and perhaps your digital cable, radio, or satellite, it will produce full 5.1 or 6.1 sound. However as new technologies emerge (ex. SACD, DVD-A), older features such as cassette and phono (turntable) will no longer be supported by future home theater receivers.

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The big players in the field are all trying to catch up with Sony, who is well out in front. I own a Sony home theater receiver. Other top-selling brands are Panasonic, Denon, JVC, Kenwood, Onkyo, RCA, Pioneer, and Yamaha. Depending on your needs (power) all are safe bets.

Here are some reviews of some leading home theater receiver manufacturers.
1. Sony
 2. Panasonic
 3. Pioneer
 4. Harman Kardon
 5. JVC
 6. Onkyo
 7. Denon

Today's standard for home theater receivers is Dolby Digital. The receiver you purchase should at least have Dolby Digital sound decoding. DTS is another decoding format but is less common. Get a receiver with both. Different DVD movies are encoded with at least Dolby Digital and sometimes also DTS. Personally, I find DTS provides clearer, crisper sound.

Now don't be tricked into buying a home theater receiver touting only Dolby Pro Logic functionality. It's an old an outdated sound encoding system that is now obsolete. Now that it's star has faded, some manufacturers are trying to sell off their remaining units at cheap prices to limit their losses.

You should expect to pay between $250 and $1000 for a good quality home theater receiver. The difference in price is partly due to the features it includes, and is partly due to its power rating. The higher the power handling of a receiver, the greater it's volume capabilities and sound clarity at higher volume levels. Of course, more power costs more money. For average users a system rated at 50 to 100 watts per channel is more than enough.

I'm going to outline some key features to consider when purchasing a new home theater receiver.

Remote Control - Not to be underrated as a vital component of your home theater receiver. This is how you are going to communicate with your receiver. The buttons should be clear and easy to navigate. The remote should also be programmable so that it can be used to operate all of your audio and video components.

S-video or Component Jacks - The home theater receiver you buy should have at least S-video inputs and outputs. The DVD player video is run to your receiver with an S-video cable, and then run to your TV with another S-video cable. This allows the receiver to moderate the video signal as well as allowing for its online display to be viewed on the TV. The best case scenario would be a connection from your DVD player to your receiver and then to your TV with component video cables which split the video image into three digital color streams. This requires that your DVD player, receiver and TV have component video jacks. A note - Only higher end TVs will have the connections and capability for component video.

A home theater receiver is essential to a home theater system. Don't consider using your current audio receiver to do the job. Dedicate that one to playing CDs. Here's why. I can connect speakers to a regular receiver and put the speakers all around my room and play a movie and call it "surround sound", but it really isn't. Just because there are speakers behind you doesn't mean they're doing what they should. What they should be doing is reproducing sound that would be coming from behind your perspective as you watch the video image on the screen. Unless this is happening (with a multi-channel receiver) that speaker behind you is just shooting out the same sounds as all the other speakers in the room. It's not realistic. That's not good enough.

Well that's it for receivers. Really it is. The home theater receiver just adds increased functionalities to an already existing technology. With the ability to decode more than 2-channels of sound, as was the previous technology, home theater receivers simply allow us to watch movies with multi-dimensional sound. It's not a moot point. Otherwise we might as well consider ourselves back in 1990.

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Future Update: Dolby Digital EX (also DTS-ES) which represents 6.1 channel decoding is gaining popularity and will be the newer standard for a few short years. Also gaining popularity is extended Dolby and DTS encoding representing 7.1 channel sound, which incorporates two rear center channel speakers in addition to the standard rear left and right surround speakers of 5.1 encoding. 7.1 encoding is in its infancy and is only available from limited top-end manufacturers. THX decoding developed by Lucasfilm (yes, think George Lucas of Star Wars fame) provides certification to product which meets its criteria for performance. Don't worry about this until its determined whether it catches on and becomes important in the future or not.

PLEASE - If there is a review for home theater receivers you don't see and would like me to investigate and include here, please email us through our Contact Us page with your request.