Buy Sony STR-DE895/B Receiver (Black)Sony STR-DE895/B Receiver (Black) Product Description:
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
EXCELLENT VALUE FOR HD TV
By Peter Previte
What attracted me to this particular receiver was it's ability to handle Component Video and High Definition TV, in particular. I recently bought an HD-ready TV and have an HD Cable TV Converter as well as a DVD player with Progressive Scan. I needed a new receiver that could handle the switching duties between the various components. The 895 does the job handily. A necessary feature was the 80Mhz pass-thru between the Converter box and the Monitor. (No other A/V receivers in this price range have this high a quality of spec.) This allows ample bandwidth for the High Definition signal to pass thru the receiver and onto the Monitor with no degradation to the signal.In addition to a dedicated Component Video input for the DVD Player, the receiver boasts a coaxial digital audio input. The Progressive Scan video and CD quality sound that the 895 allows to pass through is extraordinary.Then there is the 895's 6.1 surround sound.... fantastic! I have a unique situation in that I have 2 CD Players with digital outputs that needed to be hooked up to the receiver. No problem due to the assignable fibre optic digital inputs. You can even re-label how you want the input description to show up on the front panel of the 895. Cool! (So was the color option - I opted for the silver to match my TV ;-) I have been extremely satisfied with this Sony receiver and rate it a solid 5 STARS.
25 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
THIS IS A GOOD ENTRY-LEVEL RECEIVER
By David B. Bennett
First of all I want to describe the positive points about this receiver, and then I will point out its weak points. This receiver is extremely easy to hook-up and set-up, although if one is going to use this receiver as the heart of a surround sound home theater system, then there are a lot of parameters that must be set up prior to the first listening. These parameter adjustments may take up to 8 to 10 hours, but they are easy and straight forward, and the manual is very well written to allow a first time user the ability to sort through all of the various features and adjustments with minimal frustration. If one is using this as the heart of a surround sound home theatre system, this receiver does provide ample connections and features to assure forward compatability with various componets and encoding, decoding of digital material. With its fiber optic inputs (which I highly recommend using) and onboard DACs, this receiver provides the flexibility that one needs to control a variety of home theatre products. The best feature of this product is the musicallity of the onboard amplifiers. With low distortion, high power, and quick response times, this receiver is an able bodied amplifier for even the most demanding musical numbers.The only reason why I bought this receiver was for the six channel discreet amplifier section coupled to a six channel analog input option. This feature was neccasary for my set-up as I have a SACD player. It is here that the receiver earns its low rateing of only three stars. The tone controls, which are pretty cheap to begin with, having no loudness compensation circuit, do not even work with a multi-channel input. The tone controls only operate on the front two channels, so any time a person wants to enjoy surround sound, it is relatively flat WITH NO POSSIBLE WAY TO ADJUST THE FREQUENCY. This is a real weakness for a receiver that was intended to be the heart of a surround sound system, but the engineers must have felt that they could save enough money by not including any tone controls that it warrented this obvious lack of crucial adjustment. Every musical piece, and most movie playback, would benifit from the ability for a user to adjust the frequency response slightly, tweek the sound so to speak. I can understand that adding tone controls to a receiver my cost a little bit of money, but the exclusion of tone controls seems to me to be a shame that SONY should rectify ASAP. But it must be remebered that this is an entry level receiver, so I guess one can't be to critical. All in all, if you are in the market for a low-cost, entry level receiver for a home theatre system, consider this model. If you have a little more money, I would highly recommend skipping this model and moving up to a genuine high fidelity receiver.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.Great receiver for the price
By A Customer
Love this receiver. Price is way low and it's packed with tons of features. Plenty of power to drive all my speakers. An user here complained about the lack of tone control but I disagree. There are just a lot of settings you can tweek on this machine. You can set your bass/treb levels, speaker sizes, speaker distances, speaker heights, and a few more. Haven't found anything bad about this receiver. I was comparing this with other brands such as Yamaha and Onkyo. They lacked some of the crucial features I was looking for (assignable digital audio inputs, video switching, etc) and the Sony looks great. Definitely recommend.
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