Gear Patrol | Spirit of Adventure, Passion for Gear

Home sweet home theater

As rabid movie, music fans and gamers, we’re always on the hunt for gear that can push our home entertainment experience to 11 (much to our better half’s chagrin). This roundup includes some of our favorite home theater products out today that we’d love to host in our living room. Continues after the jump.

Sound Off (the Hook)

The Elite SC-57 receiver’s ($2,100) biggest claim to fame is power. Its proprietary D3 digital amplifier assumes the throne as the most powerful amp of any multichannel A/V receiver in the industry and is the only one of its kind to receive THX Ultra 2 Plus certification. From a capabilities standpoint, this unique power plant [...]

Making Master Control Look Weak

The Pioneer VSX-1021-K 7.1 Home Theater Receiver ($550) has iPhone and iPad integration oozing out of its amplified pores. First and foremost, it’s the first midrange receiver out of the gate to ship AirPlay ready — which allows iOS and Mac users to stream music wirelessly to their main home theater system, as well as [...]

Get Robust Home Theater Sound in One Big A@# Box

Anyone in the market for a one-stop solution to great home theater, optimized for both music and movies need look no further. The Onkyo HT-S7200 is the latest from the company that’s praised continually for the quality of their home theater-in-a-box systems. Combining two separately sold components capable of solid performance into one convenient set [...]

Heavyweight Sound Meets Lightweight Design

Step up your middling receiver. Marantz’s NR1501 proves that you don’t need a hulking beast to bring quality surround sound to your home. The NR1501 features a 50 watt by 7 discrete amplifier, 4 HDMI 1.3 inputs (1 output), Dolby TrueHD and dts-HD Master Audio decoders, an independent audio board, MRAC microphone auto calibration, 3 [...]

Multitasking Audio & Video, at a Great Price

Home theater receivers have always been intimidating products, especially for first time buyers. Four years ago though, picking the best device hinged solely on audio performance. The advent of HDMI and advances in video processing, however, have now changed the game. To serve as both the brains and brawn of home entertainment, modern receivers must [...]

I’ve got at least three or four 96 disc Case Logic cases sitting around in my car at any given time and frankly the thought of ripping them all to iTunes and putting them on my iPod sounds like far more effort than I have time for. The Pioneer’s DEH-P6000UB CD receiver is perfect, it [...]

First, Pioneer wins no awards for the name of this receiver, but they do should be awarded for packing this much technology into a mid-range receiver. It’s got three HDMI inputs, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, HDMI HD upscaling, six digital inputs, microphone based multi-channel acoustic calibration, Digital iPod input, XM and Sirius Satellite Radio, [...]

[click on image to enlarge] Eclipse by Fujitsu Ten is one of the top dogs in car and mobile audio. TomTom is just the same in the mobile navigation realm. We suppose it only makes sense that brands as successful as these two are decide to get frisky and come up with a co-branded device [...]

Sony’s bringing the heat with their ‘elevated standard’ series of receivers. Seemingly forgotten for the past few years, the ES receivers will be bringing some capabilities little expected from the electronics giant, especially not at this price point. We don’t have space to list all the specs on the new Sony ES line of receivers [...]

This Yamaha receiver will keep your next movie night, party or music juiced with 7.1 channels of 130 watts per channel sound. It’s myriad of surround sound options are supplemented by it’s high definition technologies. Oh, and it’ll hook right up with your iPod too. What this means to you: So many audiophiles have fallen [...]