Sony Debuts New Home Theater Receivers to Support 1080P/HDMI
By Chris Boylan
Although
Sony's new
52-inch LCD flat panel and
1080p front projector for under $5K were big news, Sony's announcements at CEDIA this year weren't limited to video. On the audio front, Sony displayed new receivers in their ES (Elevated Standard) line with HDMI 1.2 support, both with 1080p passthrough on HDMI, one of which upscales analog and digital video inputs to Full HD 1080p HDMI output.
With the BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc Player now scheduled to ship in October, the
STR-DA5200ES receiver ($1500, October) has all the features necessary to take advantage of the sonic and visual advantages of Blu-Ray Disc as well as HD-DVD. Plus the receiver's Faroudja/Cortez scaler and analog to digital video upscaling (all the way up to 1080p) should allow owners to easily integrate legacy sources, like VCRs, satellite boxes, laserdisc players and DVD players into a home theater system, with just a single HDMI cable between the receiver and their HDTV monitor or projector.
As expected, the CEDIA geeks (myself included) paid much more attention to the Sony receiver's backside (with 3, count' em THREE HDMI inputs) than to the front.
The receiver's newly designed GUI menu is greatly enhanced over previous generations, inspired by the PSP's (PlayStation Portable) "Cross Media Bar." The receiver's menu even offers a picture-in-picture feature for monitoring your choice of video source.
The STR-DA5200ES GUI menu is icon-driven, and inspired by the PSP.
In the audio department, the receiver is rated at 120 Watts/Channel with all 7.1 channels driven. The receiver supports all of the "regular" Dolby and DTS surround modes but (since it does not support HDMI 1.3) not the very latest lossless formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. However, since HD-DVD players (and presumably future Blu-ray players) internally expand these formats to uncompressed PCM digital audio, the receiver can decode the full, lossless surround soundtrack (up to 7.1 channels) via its HDMI multi-channel PCM support. In other words, you don't have to wait for HDMI 1.3 to get your high quality lossless multi-channel audio support.
The receiver features XM Connect-and-Play and XM 5.1 Neural Surround compatibility as well as Sony's auto-calibration feature - Digital Cinema Auto Calibration (DCAC) - which automatically measures and adjusts speaker distances and levels and also corrects for room response anomolies via a supplied microphone and built-in parametric equalizer.
Sony's STR-DA3200ES features HDMI passthrough (up to 1080P) as well as DCAC auto-calibration.
If analog video upconversion and a fancy menu are not that important to you (and you can live with 2 instead of 3 HDMI inputs), you can grab the
STR-DA3200ES receiver ($900, September) for about $600 less. It includes 1080P HDMI support as well (passthrough) but no analog-to-digital video upscaling. It's also rated for 120 Watts/Channel and includes XM support as well as Sony's DCAC auto calibration technology.
