Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black) Decide Now


I have had the TX-SR806 for about two weeks now, and it's a mixed bag at best. Overall it's a good/almost-great receiver for a home theater, but there are some problems that are leading me to return it. Not sure if I will try another 806, stay with Onkyo or jump brands.

Good:
* Audio quality is superb: clean, low distortion, and plenty loud for anything a normal human would need
* 5 HDMI inputs is an awesome feature.
* The remote control has presets for every other component I own, and seems to be almost completely compatible with them (this is a first)
* Not sure what the difference is, the but the Audyssey calibration routine produced much better results with this receiver vs. the TX-SR705 I had earlier this year.

Bad:
* Receiver does not correctly handle the component video output from my Wii (blue screens after a few seconds of showing Wii output)
* The remote does not have a backlight
* The remote needs a few "general purpose" buttons -- I have no place to assign the A,B and C buttons from my Time-Warner DVR
* The remote only has two macro buttons -- last year's TX-SR705 had three

Ugly:
* This will be the third Onkyo receiver I have returned to Amazon because it didn't work right. The first one (TX-SR705 bought in ~March) arrived with two of three HDMI input channels completely dead. The second worked fine for about a month and then one of the HDMI inputs died. This one is going back because of the Wii component video issue.
* Onkyo's tech support is truly unhelpful. They refuse to even consider that the problem might be something in the receiver, despite the fact that the Wii works just fine with every other display device. I suspect that the problem is something in the fancy Faroudja video subsystem the 806 uses, and that Onkyo has not tested the 806 with a Wii over the component output. The tech guy from Onkyo simply recommended I go back to the composite output (ugh) and refused to help otherwise.

If everything worked properly, I would rate the receiver 5 stars. But with my *third straight* Onkyo receiver having video problems, I have to question Onkyo as a brand.

Get more detail about Onkyo TX-SR806 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black).

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