Home > Consumer Reviews > Onkyo TX-SR705 7.1 Channel Home Theater Receiver (Black)

This reciever is great with my Harman Kardon HKTS-18 7.1 speaker system and Toshiba A35 HD DVD player. Sound is great and the Audussey works well as a baseline for audio setup. Easy to program all features and menu's are decent.

My only complaint is the Zone 2 feature as it is not user friendly and will not accept digital inputs. I had to run standard RCA cables from my Digital Cable and Music box to the Onkyo tape input to get sound to my zone 2 speakers on my deck. It will not use the HDMI input for zone 2 which I think is a poor design for a reciever of this caliber.

As for the folks complaining about the clicking between modes- You just need to take the time program the reciever on how you want it to handle all sound input formats. I pretty much set the majority to Dolby Digital PLIIX movie or music. You get great 7.1 sound from just about every input format.

This has been the perfect match for what I wanted to accomplish. I have my Sony KDL-40V2500 connected to the the reciever via HDMI 1.3 cable. Computer (decoding video), DVD, TV, XBOX all display great with full 7.1 sound. I am pleased with the inexpensive Onkyo 7.1 speaker system I purchased. It is lacking in some mid but for what it cost, I couldn't be more happy. I expect upgrading the two front speakers to some decent towers will fill it in.
Speaker setup with the wizard is great. I have room to grow while using everything I have now on my HDTV.

As other reviewers have stated, this is an amazing product, especially for the price. I'm using an Oppo Digital DV-980H (another 5-star product) to feed SACD and DVD-Audio (via HDMI) to the Onkyo.

Initially, I was having problems with the "overblown" or "hot" sound from DSD over HDMI that other reviewers have complained of. However, re-running Audyssey XT EQ a few times sorted that out. My problem was that I have a projector (Mitsubishi HD-1000) in my room, and I guess it was noisy enough to affect the Audyssey measurements. After turning off the projector and running the Audyssey again, I got a much better sound from the EQ. It's now hard for me to listen to my system without the EQ enabled. Also, make sure that you have your listening modes set up correctly for both 2-channel and multichannel DSD sources.

In any case, this is a great product for anyone who has a disc player that can output advanced audio over the HDMI. Another great thing about the Onkyo/Oppo pairing is that the combination will play the disc even if the display is turned off, so if you just want to listen to music, you don't need to keep your display on. I haven't had this success with other HDMI 1.2 and 1.3 compliant players.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these products as much as I do.

I just up graded from a Onkyo 575 and I must say that I was shocked at the sound quality and performance of my new receiver! Very easy to work and set -up. I'm running two Onkyo 501 amps with this and it was very easy to figure out how to hook everything up. The power this receiver has is almost unbelievable as well. I haven't had it up past -20 yet but I can tell it will have more than enough power for my home theater ;o) For the money it was well spent and I'm very glad I bought this cheaper model because it has it all without the high $ price tag.

This is my second surround receiver, so it should be straightforward to set up. Not. Took hours to figure out how to get a video signal to the TV. Too many factory defaults are set wrong, like getting video passed through.

The manual is very thick and terrible. No meaningful organization to actually get up and running, you keep hitting brick walls and sent down rabbit trails. Without even having video to the TV, you are left using the front panel display for selections, which is pretty hopeless in itself.

And even after two weeks of use, I found that the default setting for audio is a 40 ms delay. No wonder things are out of sync; this is only suitable for progressive disk players, not live TV broadcasts, which typically should be close to zero delay. You might assume the default would be zero; but it's not. You have to check everything.

In short, this is a very capable receiver, but getting it set up is just awful. Once you --finally-- reach the audio "audessy" setup with the microphone, it is painless. Audessy works quite well. They have solved the typical setup problems, but allowed a host of others to crop up.

Fan noise is excessive, the fan seems to have 2 speeds: on and off. It also seems to make a ringing sound as its frequency often reinforces the sound of the (normally quiet) fan in my 60" Sony LCD projector above it.

This is the best bang for the buck, sounds fabulous, but -- really -- needs a better manual.