The Onkyo TX-SR576 AV Receiver has come as a real blessing for those who are looking for an inexpensive arrangement that is equipped with the expertise to handle the latest formats. Blu-ray players may still prove to be a rather costly proposition, particularly when you are on a tight budget. The TX-SR576 apart from being pretty affordable, gives you instant and uninterrupted access to HD audio.
The best thing about the unit is its built-in Dolby Digital Plus decoding feature, which allows you to connect a Blu-ray player to one of its three HDMI v1.2a inputs so that you can enjoy some enthralling sound that has been intrinsically enhanced. Quite interestingly, if your Blu-ray player can internally decode HD audio formats to uncompressed multichannel PCM, then you can use it as a source for the Onkyo TX-SR 576 via HDMI and enjoy the benefits of Dolby True HD, DTS HD and DTS HD Master Audio. Moreover, it has onboard Dolby Digital EX, DTS ES, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS Neo:6 and DTS 96/24 decoding features.
Meanwhile, it also supports full 1080p HDMI video switching, which means that can pass up to three hi-def video sources through the unit to your display. The lack of an upscaling option is, however, quite glaring. The unit is also generous as far as video socket is concerned and provides you two component video inputs and one output, three S-video inputs and one output, apart from three composite inputs and two outputs.
The audio socket section, on the other hand, is decorated by two optical and two coaxial digital audio inputs, four analogue stereo inputs and a set of colour-coded 7.1-channel analogue inputs. The last feature, in particular, is quite significant as it allows you to feed in decoded audio signals from Blu-ray, DVD-Audio or SACD players.
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