Bright As A Button
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday October 9, 2000
IF home-theatre and video equipment designers are so smart, how come so many remote controls are black, a colour that makes them almost impossible to find in a darkened room? If you solve that problem by using Velcro to fasten the remote to the arm of your couch you'll discover something else: most remote controls have black buttons so, even if you have the remote in your hand, it can be difficult to work out which button does what (though, with some remotes sporting as many as 86 buttons, this can be difficult even in broad daylight).
The designers at Onkyo obviously know a thing or three about remote controls, because the one provided with the TX-DS777 has buttons with built-in lighting. Press the illumination control and the remote lights up like a Christmas tree. In another clever move, Onkyo uses buttons with distinctive shapes, so you can find the 10 most often-used buttons with your eyes closed.
Onkyo's TX-DS777 is one of the few multichannel home-theatre receivers with discrete output stages for each of the five channels. It's also one of the few to use extruded aluminium heat sinks to dissipate heat from those stages. The result is that the receiver delivers very high power (more than 100 watts continuous per channel) without the need for an annoying cooling fan. The TX-DS777's build quality is outstandingly good, particularly the power supply. Onkyo's confidence in its workmanship is revealed by its unprecedented five-year parts and labour guarantee, twice the industry average for an electronic component.
THX-certified, the TX-DS777 contains both Dolby Digital 5.1-channel and Digital Theatre Systems (DTS) decoders. It also has a Cinema Re-Equalisation (Re-EQ) circuit to remove excessive high-frequency brightness, and a "compansion" circuit to reduce the dynamic range of movie soundtracks, making them more suitable for listening late at night. The smartest and most useful circuit, however, is Onkyo's unique "Intellivolume". With most home-theatre receivers, you have to adjust the volume control every time you switch from one source to another (from DVD to VCR, for example), because each component produces a different signal level. Intellivolume compensates for these differences, so each source is reproduced at exactly the same volume.
Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is used to simulate a range of acoustic environments. Users have control over reflection level, reverberation level and room "size", as well as relative speaker level. An unusual circuit allows DSP effects to be applied to only the rear channels, rather than to all five, as is the case with most receivers. It is particularly effective with DVDs of live concerts.
Onkyo's TX-DS777 is one of the first A/V receivers I've seen that can be customised to suit the musical tastes and lifestyles of individual owners, rather than vice versa.
infofile
Onkyo TX-DS777 A/V Receiver
Price: $2,414
Amber Technology Pty Ltd
Unit B/5 Skyline Place, Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086
1800 251 367
info@amber.aust.com
www.ambertech.com.au
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald
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