I just received my new Sony STR-DH810 7.1 on Friday afternoon. I already had the previous version, the STR-DH800 set up in the living room. The DH810 I got for the den. It took less than an hour to pull the plugs out of my old Sony (non-HDMI) receiver and set-up the DH810. I would recommend that anyone getting this get a set of banana plugs for the speaker inputs. You "can" get the wires in the "screw-in" connectors, but banana plugs are just so much easier to deal with. I am using all 3 component inputs, 3 of 4 HDMI, Composite and CD, including DVD Coax, and all Optical audio inputs. Everything is very accessible and clearly labeled.
Once I had everything set up, I ran through the Audio/Video set-up manually. The DH810 comes with a mic that allows you to automatically configure your sound system (the receiver does all the work, but I prefer to do the "tweaking" manually. But that's just me. However, that said, after manually setting up my system, I reset the receiver and allowed the included mic to automatically detect and set up my sound system (just to see how it handled the task) and it did a bangin' job! Very easy automated and intuitive set-up.
The initial set-up is a breeze. Hold down the On/Off button on the receiver for 5 seconds until the receiver says CLEAR (which you can do anytime you want to undo any major blunders or just start fresh). Press the speaker button on the receiver until your speaker set-up appears, select your desired input button on the remote, crank up the volume and you have sound! From there, the remote's menu allows you to configure all the tweaks like EQ, Speaker distance, balance, bass, treble, you TVs resolution, etc. I would prefer some kind of TV-On-Screen Menu, but that is not really a big deal to me.
The sound is phenomenal and the DVD upscaling is very cool. I have Avatar on DVD (not blu ray) and the picture upscaled crisp and clear. The sound coming out of the speakers is clean and crisp. My audio CD's, movies, Cable TV, all sound great with the DH810.
I had been putting off buying this until someone gave it a rating, and I finally found a couple on the web that convinced me to give it an "early-adopter" try. Suffice to say, I am NOT DISAPPOINTED! The Price of $285 with no shipping was just a BIG plus too.
I will probably add to my rating later on, but for now, I HEARTILY recommend the STR-DH810 to anyone that has been hankering to upgrade their sound system with an upscaling 1080p A/V Receiver.
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