How to Select a Home Theater Receiver

 

Granville,

I don’t worry too much about power numbers these days.  Most good home theater receivers have plenty of power and unless you know that you’re going to need more power because of some circumstance – like a huge room or large audiences – today’s receivers are all built with satisfaction in mind.  We all want things to work together and not throw curveballs at our customers.

Anything on this page is fine by me.  Bigger power supplies and quality output transistors:

Home Theater Receivers

Brian

 

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Dear Brian:

One last question (hopefully). I am about to receive your HD 5.1 in wall system, and if I were tech literate I would read the specs of the speakers and decide how powerful my Home Theater Receiver should be.

I am not remotely tech literate. The room it will be used in is 16’ to the front and 12’ to the sides.

Since my goal is to not blow the speakers (or my ears), how many watts do you recommend?   100   200   500 ?
And the same applies to the Subwoofer  100   200  etc.  ?

Is there anything else besides watts to consider?

Thanks for your help,  Granville

 

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DISCUSSION

To expand a bit on some simple specs on receivers, there are two main things you should be looking for: power supplies and output transistors.

The power supplies are kind of like a bucket brigade of electric current.  The bigger the bucket and the fast they refill on the supply side, the more quality output comes out of the sound side.

The transistors are the things that change wall electricity into audible sound.  They switch on and off very fast, taking cues from a low level input (like an iPod, CD player, BluRay, etc.) and converting electrical power to align with the sound that the input is giving it to reproduce.  These are the ‘voices’ of the amplifier.  We’d like to see a Pavarotti over a teenager going through puberty.  The better transistors are large and robust. The cheaper receivers/amps employ integrated chips (IC) styles that are more suited to computing than audio but they do an adequate enough job to fool most who don’t know better.

I like these companies for a consistent year to year commitment to the quality of the sound first and foremost: Harman/Kardon, Denon, Yamaha, and Onkyo. Take a look at the products that we have in stock from these brands:

Home Theater Receivers