A home receiver is a must for any surround sound system and it also adds a considerable amount of simplification, convenience and clarity to any home system. One of the best things about a getting a home receiver is that it allows you to plug all of your other systems like a DVD/ Blu-ray player, speaker system, gaming console, satellite radio and cable/satellite box into it and then all you have to do is run a single HDMI cable to your television. Setting your system up this way makes it much easier to adjust your system, gives you’re the ability to hook up more systems at once and lets you easily switch between systems. With most new systems you can also tune your system for each individual system so that you always get optimum sound no matter what you are listening to.

Another cool feature is an Ethernet jack which can allow you to stream music and videos right to your television or even just surf the web.

When looking for a receiver there are a few important specifications that can have a big impact on sound quality. The first thing that you need to do is consider what kind of speakers you are going to use. If you are going to use surround sound make sure your receiver can handle your system for instance a 5.1 surround sound system receiver contains five speaker channels and has one dedicated subwoofer channel so make sure your choice has enough channels for your system. Most subwoofer are self powered and have a built in amp so you don’t need to worry too much about having enough power for it.

Besides speaker outputs you also need to make sure that the receiver has enough video connections to take in all for your different components as well as having room for any products that you might want to purchase in the future. you also need to make sure that they are the right types of ports (HDMI, RGB, Component, Coaxial, XLR, or fiber optic) and it is always better to have more ports then you need then not enough.

You also need to think about how much power you are going to need and there are two major factors that affect your power needs. A big factor is the size of the room, the larger the room the more ample power you will need and the other factor is the sensitivity of your speakers. Speakers with low sensitivity need more power to get to higher volumes even using high watt speakers. You also need to look at the level of distortion in the power of the receiver that you are looking at and you can do this by checking its total harmonic distortion (THD). Since most receivers have a THD below 1% it is easy to over look this spec but really clear systems have a THD below .1% and it makes a big difference in sound quality especially at higher volumes.

A clue into the quality of your receiver is how its power is rated. Receivers that are good quality always display a “full bandwidth power rating” which means it is rated for how it performs over the entire spectrum of human hearing. Poor quality systems will only rate their receiver over a small range of frequencies or even a single frequency. When a company uses a full bandwidth power rating shows that they have a high standard for the quality of their products.