Pioneer VSX-1019AH-K 7-Channel A/V Receiver (Black) Immediately

Let me first say setup was trial and error over a couple of days. I highly recommend even if you are a veteran of electronics to go sign up at avsforum.com cause those guys are a great help if you need questions asked. Okay to my review. This thing once you have it setup is amazing. This product is HOT literally.

My setup. I have a 50in. Samsung HLT5087SAX DLP TV with the LED Light Engine. Then I have a Samsung Blu-Ray BD-P3600 Player, Directv HR20 HD DVR, and an oldschool Xbox 360 via component cables w/ 5.1 DD.

OKay I have the Bluray and the Directv DVR going in HDMI to the receiver. I have the Directv audio going in as a optical digital cable since I ran into some screwups with HDMI audio not switching from standard def audio from HD audio. It was like I could hear audio on HD channels but not analog standard def channels. So the optical cable fixed that.

Blu-Ray sound is amazing. I can hear Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio. It is phenominal. I use bitstream audiophile on the Bluray player so it sends the primary audio uncompressed for the receiver to decode. PCM also works great to hear the 2nd audios and third (menu/button press) audio, but I prefer the receiver to do the decoding. Also everything i have is HDMI 1.3 so man watching these Blu-Rays at 24FPS and hearing the movies is awesome.

Cool thing is and one of the major selling points was the HDMI upscaler. If you have component or analog source devices it will convert them to HDMI so you can leave the TV on HDMI1 input the whole time and just change the receiver sources on the receiver. My 360 did do component 1080p, but I had to bump 360 down to 1080i because the highest component signal that the pioneer receiver video scaler will do is 1080i. So once I did that I had the 360 finally working. Weird thing is that it will show DVD movies on the 360 and Netflix movies on the 360 it will show those as 1080p@60hz. Pretty sure for the games and dashboard it will only do 1080i with my working setup. This method will tide me over till I get a Xbox 360 Jasper that has HDMI.

As far as sound goes I have a 5.1 setup, and the receiver comes with this mic that you plug in and you put in the center of the room or in your favorite listening position. I put it in the center of the room on my video camera tripod at ear level for movie watching. I let it run through a 5-8 minute test of speaker test tones and it came back and set each speaker's loudness and distance and also recognized my speakers as small, with loud sounds to come out of the subwoofer. Did all that on it's own. So it really is the best option to let it auto setup the speakers. It is an amazing technology.

Playing Gears of War 2 shooting my golden lancer there is some nice bass to it. It set my speakers to not too loud, but the subwoofer it set it up pretty loud just because it takes care of all the bass sounds/tones via the LFE.

I got the Batman Begin and Dark Knight on BluRay coming out as 1080p@24hz. That is 24fps! The same as when they actually film the movie HiDef Film. PLus those movies are playing uncompressed audio Dolby TrueHD! It is legendary. I also have The Wrestler movie and it does the DTS HD Master Audio, and for a drama movie like that it sounds really good as well.

Anyways if you are looking to blow $500 on a new receiver or if your old receiver gave out on you after 8 years (like me) you will be happy with going the route of the VSX-1019AH-k. Get more detail about Pioneer VSX-1019AH-K 7-Channel A/V Receiver (Black).