Onkyo TX-SR605 Home Theater Setup
March 26th, 2008 by Mike K
Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my personal home theater. Last night after work I hooked up my new receiver – the Onkyo TX-SR605. I’ve noticed this unit has sold extremely well at OneCall over this past year or so but wasn’t fully sure why until last night.
Until last night I had been running all my components through a JVC component switch box that required me to get up, walk over to my rack, open the door, and push a button to switch the video signal that feeds my front projector. This has worked fine for several years and honestly I probably needed the exercise so I can’t complain, but for this recent update to my setup I wanted to delve into the world of HDMI.
The TX-SR605 has HDMI 1.3 repeaters meaning it takes video and audio signals from your various HDMI components and repeats that signal out to my front projector. Obviously the projector has no part in my audio setup but I do appreciate that my new Up-converting DVD player (Toshiba SD-6100) was hooked up with one single cable.
My Comcast HD DVR was previously run through component cables and coaxial cable for audio. For some reason last night I could not get the Comcast box to output audio via coaxial or optical cable. As it was getting late and my TV watching time was rapidly approaching I grabbed the HDMI cable from the DVD player and plugged it into the cable box. My audio issues were instantly fixed (after a quick setting change to the receiver) and as a bonus my cable TV looked noticeably sharper. In fact, the HDMI worked so well I decided to pick up another cable today and I’ll run both my DVR and DVD player that way.
Which leads to my only complaint about the TX-SR605 – it only has 2 HDMI inputs. It also accepts 3 component inputs so I have plenty of HD connectivity, it’s just that I didn’t expect to like HDMI nearly as much as I did.
Other than that minor issue, the TX-SR605 is an excellent piece of equipment ideally suited for a home theater environment. I was able to quickly setup my speakers, setting crossover points for all my speakers and subwoofer. Sometime this weekend I’ll hook-up the included mic and run the Audyssey 2EQ setup to fine tune the system automatically. I do plan to eventually include a Blu-ray player into this setup (once Profile 2.0 players are available) and this receiver can handle all the new audio formats through HDMI as well.
All in all I have been very happy with this receiver and can see why Onkyo has been such a hot brand recently. They were one of the first to embrace HDMI 1.3 and the new audio formats Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD decoding – all at a reasonable price.
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