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(More customer reviews)Well, I decided to bite the bullet and buy this receiver despite the lack of reviews. Let me preface this review by saying that I am just a normal guy who likes good quality sound, and am by no means an audiophile. I am however a pretty thorough shopper and knew what I was looking for: a good quality receiver that could do HDMI switching for a good price. Unfortunately, those three qualifications seem to rarely line up... If you want quality, you can have price and HDMI switching... If you want price and quality, forget about the HDMI switching.
I looked at literally dozens of receivers over several months before settling on the DA-3200ES. Early favorites included the Sony STR-DG1000, the Yamaha RX-V1700, the Harmon Kardon 445, and the Denon AVR-887 and 2807. The reason I settled on the 3200ES was honestly because it was an unknown (as crazy as that seems.) Unlike many of the others, there were no reviews or rankings and so I took the plunge. My thought was this: Since I was replacing an older (about three years old) 5.1 Sony receiver and I am happy with Sony products, I thought it might be worth a shot. Additionally, being an ES, it is supposedly "upper end" of the Sony product line.
The box arrived and I had to wait for a few weeks to install the receiver as it was going into our new house (unfortunately only pre-wired for 5.1 speakers.) When I did hook it up, I matched it to the Toshiba SD-6980 DVD, an LG 42PX4D TV, HKTS-14 speakers, and our cable-company supplied HD receiver. Set up was a snap. I ran the speakers to their hook ups, the DVD player to HDMI input 1, and the cable box to HDMI input 2. HDMI out went directly to the TV. One of the great things about this receiver is the amount of possible connections on the reverse. I finally settled on HDMI cables for all inputs, but with the addition of optical sound cabling. After about an hour of hooking up the connections, I rolled out the included microphone for setting up the speaker levels, and placed it in the middle of the room. The room itself is 2 stories tall and just over 400 square feet with hardwood floors, so getting the sound "right" is quite a chore!
I was sweating the interaction of the receiver with the television, since I have never used on-screen programming for one of my components like this before. To my surprise, it worked flawlessly. The set up instructions note that the testing of the speakers is quite loud, but I wasn't too terribly worried about waking up the neighborhood when it happened (it was loud, but tolerable.) After setting up the speakers, which took less than 5 minutes total, the system was ready to go. My kids hadn't seen Ice Age 2 yet, so I bought it for them to use as a test for the system. It worked flawlessly. The sound was great, and everything seemed to work as planned. Overall, I was (and still am) very pleased.
To caveat this review, I must say that I haven't been lucky enough to test out multiple receivers so I don't know if something I considered routine about the set up of this receiver might be considered difficult to some, or that something in the sound output isn't as perfect as another receiver might put out. To my ears, it sounds great and I'm happy with it. I will say that I have not tried it with 7.1 sound, nor have I tried setting up the additional two speakers in another room (nor do I intend to.) The one non-intuitive thing on the receiver was the fact that you have a separate button on the front to select the HDMI inputs. I would have assumed that these inputs would have been selectable via the input selector knob, and was rather surprised that they aren't. With a little tinkering though, it did make sense and I think as it is set up at the moment it makes operation a little easier for people who might not be as familiar with the system: push the button once for the DVD player, push it twice for cable.
Overall, I am very happy with this receiver. For what I needed, it was a great value, a quality unit and it had HDMI switching. I could have spent more money on a receiver, but I honestly don't think that it would have made much difference. I give this receiver five stars and would recommend it to others.
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