Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black)

Great bang for the buck - great receiver I hope this review can be of help to others. I guess I am a dinosaur, but my first concern with a receiver is the sound - after all, the main function of a receiver is the ability to reproduce the audio. Today, it seems as though a lot of emphasis is placed on video switching and video signal processing. In these areas, I cannot comment on the Onkyo's performance, as I do not use these features. I put all HDMI outputs directly into my tv, and use digital l(optical, or coax) to the receiver. I have been told that "true" HD can only be utilized through HDMI, as there is no compression in the audio. However, I cannot hear any "compression". I would suggest to anyone to try Master and Commander.... The cannon are right in your living room. Now on to the audio of this receiver. It has tremendous power and frequency range, and decodes Dolby Digital without a hitch. I am pleased with the clarity and separation of all channels. I find the "all channel stereo" quite nice effect. It has a lot of nice features, such as re-naming inputs, input level adjustments - makes all sources have same relative volume when switching between sources, assignable digital inputs,straight forward manual speaker setup, a digital equalizer that can be independently set for individual speakers, etc., etc. I tried a Yamaha receiver ($1400 OTD), and returned it. One thought is that the modern receivers are touted with all this power output (980 watts in the case of the Yamaha), but have lesser input power (about 620 watts for the Yamaha) cannot produce the stated power to ALL channels ALL the time. Therefore, the power ratings are not truly factual. The heart of a receiver is it's power supply - and that includes (usually) a massive transformer. Any receiver that has a rated "input" of say, 600 watts, can only provide a little under 600 watts continuous. The Yamaha weighed in at a mere 27 pounds, and my Onkyo is a hefty 39 pounds. Most of the additional weight is the transformer - power supply. Although it may sound funny, look to the weight of a receiver - which is in direct proportion to the weight of the power supply. This is where Onkyo shines - usually very conservatively rating their receivers. The only downfall I have found on this receiver, was the "Audyssey" setup - it did not recognize my rear speakers properly, and I didn't care for the EQ that it decided was needed. But the manual setup is straight forward and quite flexible, and as sound is a very personal experience, and no microphone will ever match what you want your ears to hear. Rating: 5 (Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black) customer review by eric keith, 2010-03-09)

Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Home Theater Receiver The Onkyo TX-SR806 is a pleasure to own. The state of the art features minimize cabling and simplifies usage for the different functions of a home theater. It has been a little over a year since we purchased the unit, but we wanted the time to give a more accurate assessment of the unit. Rating: 5 (Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black) customer review by JCM-, 2010-02-25)

onkyo is excellent value for your dollar nice receiver. wish i could afford premium speakers to complement how good it sounds. using old speakers from the onkyo 5100 home theater in a box. not bad, but not great either. anyways, if you're looking for a good receiver, at least buy a 600 series. if your budget allows look at the higher series. more features and more watts per channel. Rating: 5 (Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black) customer review by large and in charge, 2010-01-13)

Great clarity with controled super power Took me a while to figure out how to set my BD player to output Dolby T-HD and DTS HD. But I must say even before that, the sound was great and lots of power while controlled and well behaved. The HD formats have superb clarity, you can heard almost the smallest detail unheard of before in DD and DTS. It is slightly more powerful than my 110W Yamaha 6.1 amp before, upscaling is very good and the picture looks very good on my 120Hz tv. So far I have tried my BD, DVR, portable dvd, and laser disc player on it. All upscale without a problem. I do not have the heat problem which some other people noticed. The only draw back for me, is sometimes I want to just use the speaker on my TV for say BD player, and not turn on my amp, right now there is no way to do that, even with the pass through HDMI feature - turn on TV audio out. Still you will have to turn on the amp, and set the TV audio out on.....later switch it back off.....just a lot of work.... I like my silver unit. Rating: 5 (Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black) customer review by L. Szu Tao, 2009-12-04)

It does everything I got this to replace an old Kenwood HTiB from the pre-HDMI days and was blown away. The options provided are basically overkill. It has more inputs than I'm likely to need, despite being a retrogamer, auto level-matching and excellent sound quality. It can also rescale most anything with its on-board video processing. It can decode anything, has 7.1 sound and is quite the looker, if a bit hefty. You have a lot of options as to what input corresponds to what. Basically, the S-video is fixed, but you can assign the component, hdmi and optical and coaxial audio inputs to whatever you want, so you can, for instance, run a Wii and a PS3 on one input. It would be hard to fill this baby up. Their are only a handful of cons: -You can't do both two zones and 7.1 as there aren't enough speaker connections -It's a bit of a pain to change the output resolution and you are limited in your options. For instance, if you set the upscaler to 4:3 mode, it will squish 1080i and 720p content to 4:3 as well, so you'll have to go in and change this frequently if you are using it, but it involves a lot of flipping through menus. Ideally, you shoudl be abel to set it to scale 480p content and not 720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc. -I would have like a TV tuner in here. I don't know why these aren't standard features on receiver. Rating: 5 (Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black) customer review by Ace of Sevens, 2009-11-26)