Sony announces two new 'ES' AV receivers
Sony STR-DA5500ES
Like many manufacturers, Sony has two brands of its AV receivers--the standard line (from the STR-DH100 and the STR-DG1200) and the premium, ES (elevated standard) line. Today at CEDIA, the company announced two new models of the ES line, the STR-DA3500ES and STR-DA5500ES. Let's take a look at the feature breakdown.
Key features of the Sony STR-DA3500ES:
- 7.1 AV receiver, 100 watts per channel
- Four HDMI inputs
- Second zone HD video
- Analog video upconversion to HDMI using Faroudja video processing
- Onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio
- Graphical user interface
- XM and Sirius ready
- Available in October | $1,000 list price
Key step-up features of the Sony STR-DA5500ES:
- 7.1 AV receiver, 120 watts per channel
- Six HDMI inputs, including one front panel input
- Two HDMI outputs
- Can control receiver over network; integrates with Control4 home automation systems
- DLNA compliant
- Shoutcast and Rhapsody audio streaming
- First Sony receiver to include Automatic Phase Matching (APM), which corrects phase differences between speakers
- Available in October | $2,000 list price
While these receivers are certainly stacked with functionality, they're less impressive when compared with the competition. Onkyo's recently announced HT-RC180, for example, includes more streaming audio services (Rhapsody, Pandora, and vTuner) and five HDMI inputs for a street price of $800. On the other hand, we're excited to see some of the new functionality available on the STR-DA5500ES--especially how well both network control and the APM processing works. We're also interested to see if the company has made any tweaks to its graphical user interface, now that other manufacturers are starting to catch up.
As expensive as these receivers are and others like them, why aren't the manufacturers adding in HD radio as a standard feature? Is it cost or is HD radio not that popular?