Marantz SR5006

While Marantz is best known as a provider of high-end audio visual kit, the new Marantz SR5006 AV Receiver aims to deliver high quality, feature rich audio performance at a more accessible price point. At AED 2,799 ($762) it's still a fair investment, but with the Marantz pedigree, it's a very good step into beefing up your home entertainment.

The SR5006 comes with 6 HDMI ports, plus the full range of AV connectivity, making it ideal to hook up to all of your living room devices including DVD/BD, set top box, games consoles, Hi-Fi and PC.

The receiver is capable of 7 x 180w output at 6 Ohms or 7 x 100w at 8 Ohms, and with a good quality speaker system, the sound quality and detail of just about any source is exceptionally good.

The SR5006 is capable of handling a wide range of digital inputs such as Internet radio, streaming of music via Bluetooth, or from iTunes using AirPlay, wi-fi via a router, or USB input, thanks to a built-in digital media player, and it also has a built-in FM Tuner. It is compatible with file formats including MP3, WAA, FLAC and AAC. The SR5006 also uses the Marantz Dynamic Expander V2 which optimizes the quality of MP3 files.

The receiver can also be controlled using an iPhone, iPad or iPod using the Marantz Wizz App, available for download on the Apple Store.

If you are playing movies through the SR5006, it has includes decoders for all standard audio format, as well as support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, a great feature of which is the ability to focus voices through the central speaker during noisy action sequences, so that you can still follow dialogue.

For ease of setup, the SR5006 comes with a calibration microphone, which when placed in the main seating position in a room, will automatically analyze the room's acoustic properties using Audyssey MultEQ-XT to determine the optimal settings for 5.1 or 7 channel audio as required.

The SR5006 also has zoning controls, to allow up to three different output zones, so that speaker systems can be connected in different rooms to play from different sources all via the receiver.