Want a reasonable AV box for around £300 with HDMI

tweety

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I need to connect my LCD Sony 46W2000 / Sky + box / Sony NS76 DVD player.

I would like an box that upscales the RGB from the Skybox and pass through the HDMI DVD picture as its already upscaled. I'm not too fussy about reprocessing the signals as long as its reasonable. I normally watch SD sources from sky and the DVD player (albeit upscaled). I have no plans to get Sky HD as its a rip off. I might get a HD DVD or BlueRay later. I want reasonable sound and 5.1.

1080i or 1080p is no problem with my panel and i only need the standard 2 to 1 HDMIs. At least one scart, SVid and component would be good. Optical and Electrical sound inputs would be nice. All pretty standard, i hope !

Anybody got any suggestions of which kit to buy. The Sony units would match my setup and so the remote would be fully functional. I'm open to any manufacturer though. The cheaper the better as £300 is my upper limit.

Thanks for the help. I don't even know where to start !
 
For the money, I would look at the Onkyo 604E. At £299 it's about the cheapest decent receiver with HDMI support (that's why I got one myself). You'll find other amps in this price bracket with HDMI sockets but most of them won't support sound over HDMI or if they do they won't support uncompressed LPCM, which you'll need to support the new audio formats for BluRay etc. I haven't really seen any AVRs with scart inputs unless you're talking about 1-box home cinema systems built into a DVD player, so you'd have to connect SD sources via svideo or component. At this price point, you won't find anything that upscales, it'll just pass through whatever resolution you feed into it, but you will find stuff that upconverts, that is, you can input stuff from svideo or composite and output it via component. Upconverting to HDMI isn't an option at this price point, the cheapest for that is probably the next Onkyo amp up, the 674, at £100 more. The 604 has a 2 input, 1 output HDMI switch, so you can only output stuff via HDMI that was input as HDMI in the first place - but it does support LPCM audio (only 5.1, even though it's a 7.1 amp, but you say that's all you need).

Sony's similarly priced amps don't have as many features, you need to pay a couple of hundred quid more to get a serious competitor to this amp.
 
thanks for that. Great info. I wasn't aware of the sound issue so i will watch out for that. Looks like i might have to save up a few more pennies for an upscaling version though.

If anyone has more on a £400-500 box with the upscaling let me know.

Thanks for the help oddfeld
 
Looks like i might have to save up a few more pennies for an upscaling version though.

Why? Your TV is upscaling everything anyway, unless you spend lots of money on a scaler you'll probably find the one in the telly does just as good a job.
 
Why? Your TV is upscaling everything anyway, unless you spend lots of money on a scaler you'll probably find the one in the telly does just as good a job.


Thanks !!! is it true as isn't it only the X series that does true upscaling? Your advice is the sort of advice i'm looking for! A couple of hundred quids worth!

I'm really trying to get Sky + a bit better and also want surround for my SD DVDs. Theres the JVC RX-D701S that seems to do the job but the RGB inputs are not converted to HDMI and its not a true scaler.

I think i should just ask whats the lowest price a can get for a box that fits my requirements?
 
Well all LCD panels are upscaling the image somehow, that's just how they work - even if they report they're playing 480i or whatever they still have to use the actual physical number of pixels on the panel. So they have a built in scaler. If you get an av amp or a separate scaler box, then you're just saving the TV doing the work and any quality difference will come down to which bit of kit is better at doing the processing, the amp's scaler or the TV's.

If you want to get Sky+ looking better, you should probably just look at getting a SkyHD box before throwing lots of money at an upscaling solution for SD broadcasts that may give little or no improvement.
 

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