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As higher-end AV receivers are offering more and more channels of amplification, some buyers are left with a bit of a dilemma. What

if you want the authority and quality of a receiver at the higher end of the price scale, but can see no circumstance in which you would ever need nine channels?

Onkyo’s TX-NR818 might be just what you need. It comes with seven 135W channels and pretty much every 2012 feature you could want (or a close facsimile thereof), and it costs just a touch over $2000.

EQUIPMENTOf course those power figures are at high fidelity levels of performance into eight-ohm loads. And, of course, you can redeploy a couple of the amplifier channels to other duties. Most of these are the normal options, including supporting second or third zones and bi-amping the front speakers.

But there is one amplifier arrangement which is totally new to us. More on that later.

ONKYO TX-NR818

You also get 11 pairs of speaker binding posts, making it easy to have a number of those configurations wired up, simply switching between them electronically.

The receiver supports basically everything in the way of signals. It is well equipped with inputs (aside from S-Video, which has been abandoned), including a D-SUB15 for analogue computer signals. There’s an RS-232C socket for system integration as well.

In addition to the front USB port there’s one on the rear, so you can plug in a large hard-disk drive full of your favourite uncompressed audio and have an ultra high-quality jukebox.

Or you can go the network route with the usual DLNA support for network music, and onboard internet radio via vTuner.

There are optional dongles available for this receiver, adding either (or both) Wi-Fi ($59) and Bluetooth ($69) .

PERFORMANCEThere was one feature that made me rather excited, but unfortunately it wasn’t something I could test, because to do so properly would have required me to perform surgery on the crossover network on my speakers.

Over the years I’ve expressed doubts about the value of bi-amping loudspeakers. But there is one circumstance in which clear benefits could be realised from bi-amping: if it allowed the passive crossover network to be

cut completely out of the circuit. This receiver allows that! It implements a loudspeaker mode called the Digital Processing Crossover Network. This is like an enhancement to the bi-amping amplifier mode in which two channels are used to drive front left, and two more for front right. That standard mode is available, but this enhanced mode only outputs higher frequencies to one of the channels for each side, and only lower frequencies to the other channel. The former are connected to the midrange/tweeter assemblies and the latter to the woofers. As part of the set-up you choose one of 14 crossover frequencies, which are set at one-third octave intervals from 250 to 5000 hertz.

In other words, you can now have an active digital crossover for your stereo loudspeakers. This is one impressive feature. Onkyo says that you can use it with regular bi-amped speakers (i.e. those with their crossover networks in place, but with the jumper plates removed), but that kind of defeats its purpose. As it says, really ‘this function is meant for speakers without crossover network[s]’.

Just the presence of this feature is impressive, but it is enhanced in several ways. You can set ‘Overlap’ (have the high and low pass crossover frequencies the same, or have them overlap, with test tones provided to help). You can trim the relative volume between the high and low frequency channels (up to 6dB in 0.5dB steps).

Onkyo TX-NR818 networked AV receiverPrice: $2099

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Receivers

RATED POWER: 7 x 135W, 8 ohms, 20-20,000Hz, 0.08% THD, two channels drivenINPUTS: 8 x HDMI (1 on front), 3 x optical digital audio (1 on front), 3 x coaxial digital audio, 7 x analogue stereo audio (1 on front), 1 x 7.1 channel analogue audio, 1 x phono, 5 x composite video (1 on front), 0 x S-Video, 2 x component video, 1 x D-SUB15, 2 x USB (1 on front), 1 x Ethernet, 1 x calibration microphoneOUTPUTS: 2 x HDMI, 0 x analogue stereo audio, 1 x 9.2 channel analogue audio pre-out, 1 x composite video, 0 x S-Video, 1 x component video, 11 pairs speaker binding posts, 1 x 6.5mm headphone (front panel)ZONE: 2 x stereo audio; 2 x 12V trigger; amplifiers configurable for Zone 2 & Zone 3OTHER: IR In/Out, 1 x RS-232C, Onkyo R1 Remote Control

DIMENSIONS (whd): 435 x 199 x 436mmWEIGHT: 18.3kgWARRANTY: Three years

CONTACT: Amber TechnologyTEL: 1800 251 367WEB: www.ambertech.com.au

• Excellent overall performance• Radical new active crossover support

for loudspeakers• Strong internet service support

• Limited video processing when both HDMI outputs employed

VERDICT

Onkyo TX-NR818 networked AV receiverPrice: $2099

You can flip the phase of one of them. And you set a group delay for the tweeter of up to 30cm, so as to provide time alignment.

There are two problems with this system. First, few speaker systems provide proper support for it without the aforesaid surgery. (If this feature becomes widespread, perhaps loudspeakers will increasingly be provided with crossovers which can be switched out of line by their owners.) Second, it would take a user with considerable self-confidence to make use of this feature even with the right speakers. How would you, for example, judge the group delay or the overlap adjustments? Perhaps in the future we will see an extension of Audyssey or some other calibration system to set these things automatically.

That aside, setting up the receiver is straightforward, with Audyssey doing the bulk of the work. At the end of its set-up routine it offers you the choice of switching on Audyssey Dynamic EQ and Audyssey Dynamic Volume. The former is defaulted to ‘Yes’ if you skip straight through without paying attention. (Some brands simply apply this without letting you know. We thank Onkyo for asking.)

Audyssey Dynamic EQ re-equalises the sound to adjust the frequency balance to take account of differing sensitivities of the human ear to different frequencies at different volume levels. I reckon it sounds horrible. But Audyssey is a reputable player in this field, so you may well differ in opinion — presumably the manufacturers who implement it as a default deem it useful. The main thing here is that with this Onkyo receiver this process is not hidden from you.

But there is one thing you will definitely want to change. The default audio mode on all sources is ‘All Channel Stereo’. It would be nice if the maker of a receiver of this quality would treat its purchasers as people likely to want purity in their audio, and so set a default of a more or less ‘Direct’ mode.

After the system had tuned itself up, it seemed to me to produce pretty much perfect tonal balance from all the loudspeakers. They commanded my room with strong, clean bass and excellent precision in imaging.

There were some interesting wrinkles in this receiver’s operation. For example, you need to be careful which of the two HDMI outputs you connect to which display devices.

So far in my experience, AV receivers which offer two HDMI outputs have simply mirrored the output from the main one to the other. But not so here. For one thing, the second output (labelled ‘SUB’) is switched off by default. Second, the receiver’s own system menus are shown only on the main HDMI output, not on the SUB one. (On SUB you continue to see whatever is being played at the switched source.) This can be inconvenient or convenient depending on your set-up. I have a projector as main, and a small LCD TV as SUB, primarily to avoid having to switch on the projector unnecessarily. Not being able to see the receiver’s menus on SUB made that impossible. But if that’s not your situation, then having different stuff on the two outputs could be quite useful.

Third, when you go to the network menu, the displays are quite different. On the main one you get a graphical panel of options along with their logos. After a few minutes these disappear and a screen-saver replaces them. On the SUB output you get the same options, but as a plain white-text-on-black list.

Those network options are very thorough, and include the newly available Spotify music subscription service, DLNA, vTuner, AUPEO!, MP3tunes, Last.fm and the Germany-based Simfy music service.

As for the video processing, it was fairly impressive but lacked the level of control that we’ve enjoyed in some previous Onkyo models. In addition, how it worked depended somewhat on the output settings for the two

HDMI outputs. If you have both HDMI outputs switched on you cannot choose the output resolution; it goes to ‘Auto’. Feeding 576i/50 content into it in this mode, I found that delivered 1080p/50 to the front projector plugged into HDMI 1, and 576i/50 into the LCD TV plugged into HDMI 2.

If you have only one of the HDMI outputs switched on, though, then you can set the output resolution, all the way up to 4K (the unit also passes through 4K signals).

At the input source level you can choose all kinds of video processing options, including several forms of noise removal. The deinterlacing options are ‘Auto’ and ‘Video’. The latter locks the unit into good quality motion adaptive deinterlacing suitable for video sources. The former employs cadence detection to work out whether or not to treat the video as film-sourced. It was reasonably aggressive in its bias towards film, rather than video, but was still tricked just a little bit by my nastiest test clips.

This receiver does not offer Apple’s AirPlay, but does pretty much the same thing with Onkyo’s own remote app (for iOS and Android), which can feed music through to the unit using DLNA protocols.

CONCLUSIONThe Onkyo TX-NR818 is a powerful AV receiver, with some impressive speaker options, good network functions and excellent overall performance. Stephen Dawson

“there is one amplifier arrangement totally new to us... the Digital Processing CrossoverNetwork...”

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