Marantz SR8002 AV-receiver

As you'd expect from a $3,000-plus home theatre receiver, the SR8002 is well satisfied not merely to Bluray players and other source devices that were old fashioned, but also to DVD players. In fact, it's four HDMI inputs of the newest specification, plus built-in decoders for just about every digital audio standard created (including that for the Super Audio CD).

The receiver has considerable electricity for most speaker systems, offering 125 watts.

The receiver has Audyssey automatic setup, so that it comes with a calibration mic. You plug in the microphone, choose the right menu items, after which the receiver sends various sounds to your own loudspeakers. At the end of this, it spends a couple of minutes thinking about things, then eventually makes each of the settings for speaker sizes, spaces, degrees and so forth.

Unlike a few of the competition, this receiver doesn't include video processing circuitry that is fancy.

Performance

The video conversion was performed to a very high standard, so you can be confident in plugging your pay TV box within this receiver and receiving a great image at your display (or good, anyway, as can be provided by the screen).

The sound quality created via this receiver was exceptional in every respect. I made a couple of corrections to that's automatic calibration, after, it is. It has set the centre channel speaker to 'large', but a number of my stuff creates too much bass in the center station for the rather sized loudspeaker there to cope.

Having made that change, this receiver was, well, perfect. Stereo sound from CD was brilliant. Surround sound better still.

Conclusion

Marantz has seemingly decided to not offer all the bells and whistles provided with several other similarly priced home theatre receivers. This could show a disadvantage if you'd like to take advantage of multimedia capabilities that are more comprehensive.

But if you're just for your home theatre system after top quality handling of video and sound, the Marantz SR8002 is worth a look that is very close.