For those looking to expand their audio experience in the home theater arena, and need a high quality audio controller, with Dolby 7.2 capabilities, a compact footprint and a reasonable price, the Onkyo TX SR607 is a good candidate to take into consideration. It’s got all the firmware connections you’ll need to hook up your home theater system. It can guide up to 90 watts per channel through its system, and supports HDMI 1.3a as its video specification.

Setup is fairly easy and straightforward, as the technology has matured. Be aware that one of the places where they cut costs is by removing connection ports for legacy hardware; you may need to buy some external adapter cables if you’ve got some vintage gear you’re still determined to hook into this rig.

Sound quality is excellent, with good clarity and sounds very open. If you’ve never experienced personal theater quality at Dolby 7.2 standards, prepare to be blown away. There’s not much more to be said about the directional clarity than this: I could actually make out all the words on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit for the first time.

Even if you are only using three speakers to connect to the Onkyo, the sound will still be perfect. If you are watching a BluRay movie you can expect realistic sound effects that can be heard when watching a movie at the cinema. Who needs to go to the cinema when you can bring the cinema to you! It is easy and affordable, and anybody can use it.

One place where there’s a drawback with this system is that the HDMI control doesn’t quite meet the full backwards compatibility mode of the HDMI specification. It’s close – and we were eventually able to get it up and running, but CEG HDMI proved to be a bit challenging to configure.

One workaround to this sort of issue, which crops up when working with Samsun, Sony and Toshiba displays, is to get an IR repeater. We’ve been told that future production versions will have this firmware problem fixed, and there may be a downloadable upgrade you can run to perform this upgrade yourself. Still, even so, an IR repeater can help cover your needs.

What sets this system apart is the sound quality, and the value per dollar. It’s one of the best value Dolby 7.2 systems, and its compact size means it’s apartment friendly – even dorm room friendly. Its reasonable price puts it into a good price/performance target area. The only downside we found was the HDMI implementation, and we got a pre-release version.

As to the richness of the feature set, we’re still figuring out what all the combinations of buttons on the Onkyo’s remote can do. We’re having fun with it, and suspect you will as well.