From: Brooks Shannon on January 30th 1998:

I bought this consumer-level Dolby Pro-Logic reciever for my family for Christmas, along with a JBL Sat10/Music10 surround-sound speaker system. I like the fact that it can push 100 watts to all channels, and the proprietary 5D ProLogic mode is nice when listening to action movies. The manual claims that the 5D enhances the movement of the sound. I've found this to be somewhat true. From what I can tell, though, it mainly puts more sound to the front channels, as far as music and on-screen effects are concerned. The center seems to be used as an effects channel, not one that reproduces most of the on-screen dialogue and such, as they mainly come from the front speakers. The tuner is not bad... but at a quarter volume the thing gets to sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard. At higher levels the brightness of the sound makes it sound horrible, even when coupled with my AR 94 speakers, which sound very good in comparison on my Yamaha stereo reciever. The CD input sounds less bright than the tuner but is still a little too bright for my liking. All and all, though, it's a nice buy. It's inexpensive at the regular price of $299, and since it does push 100 watts, it helps when driving larger speakers, which my father may opt to buy in the future. As with any ProLogic reciever, it's nice to have the subwoofer and center channel outputs, as this does have. Due to the brightness of the sound, I wouldn't recommend it to an audiophile by any means, but if you're in the market for a decent ProLogic reciever with a high RMS rating and convenient features, this should work nicely.

Rating: 6