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Overview
AV Receivers are one of the many consumer electronics components typically found within a home theatre system. Their primary purpose is to amplify sound from a multitude of possible audio sources as well as route video signals to your TV from various sources. Typically you may program and configure a unit to take inputs from devices such as DVD players VCRs etc. and easily select which source you want to route to your TV and have sound output for. Consumer electronics is electronic equipment intended for use by everyday people. ...
Home cinema, also called Home theater, seeks to reproduce cinema quality video and audio in the home. ...
Usage These AV Receivers may be known simply as stereos, receivers, or "Head Units". They are usually at the heart of a typical home theatre setup or may simply be used stand-alone for audio amplification purposes. They offer a broad range of inputs and features that increase with price. Some units such as Denon receivers may cost upwards of many thousands of dollars. They are often drivers for surround sound speaker systems that may be used with anything from Minidisk players, computers or CD players. Denon is a Japanese electronics company that specializes in high-fidelity audio equipment. ...
Features
Radio reception Receivers almost always have a built in tuner for Amplitude Modulation(AM) and FM reception. But recently with the advent of XM satellite radio and Sirius Satellite Radio that has built in as well only requiring an external antenna and service activation to be connected to receive nearly CD quality sound over the air. Amplitude modulation (AM) is a form of modulation in which the amplitude of a carrier wave is varied in direct proportion to that of a modulating signal. ...
The abbreviations FM, Fm, and fm may refer to: Electrical engineering Frequency modulation (FM) and its most common applications: FM broadcasting, used primarily to broadcast music and speech at VHF frequencies FM synthesis, a sound-generation technique popularized by early digital synthesizers Science Femtometre (fm), an SI measure of length...
XM Satellite Radio Holdings (XM) NASDAQ: XMSR is a satellite radio (DARS) service in the United States and Canada. ...
Sirius Satellite Radio NASDAQ: SIRI is a satellite radio (DARS) service based in New York City that provides 68 streams (channels) of music and 55 streams of sports, news and entertainment to the United States and Canada. ...
DSP Effects Most receivers offer specialized DSP's made for handeling various presets and audio effects. Some may offer simple equalizers and balance adjustments to complex DSP audio field simulations such as "Hall", ""Arena", "Opera", etc. that simulate the audio being played in the places through use of surround sound and echo effects.
Amplification There are two types of amplifiers found in receivers "Digital Amplfiers" and "Analog Amplifiers". The analog amplifiers (Class AB Amplifiers) are usually found in higher end units and provide cleaner sound as a result of overcoming quantizing noise by not using manipulation of binary digital audio streams which results in less distortion. Although because of the relatively low efficiency of these amplifiers it is more expensive to produce high power units. Class D or "digital amplifiers" are more common and a cheap solution for audio amplification. They have more distortion though but better efficiency resulting in more power for less money. See Amplifiers for more information. Some extremely expensive units may resort to tube amplification as well. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with quantization error. ...
An amplifier is a device which changes a small movement into a larger movement. ...
AV Inputs/Outputs As mentioned before there are a wide range of AV inputs available in the back of the receivers making integration of your home theatre components easier. This however often leads to cable spaghetti unless you buy a simple cable management system which are usually just round plastic conduits with a slit for inserting and bunching cables. Typical types of connectors are the RCA connector which is used for both video and audio inputs/outputs, the S/PDIF optical ports and RCA Digital audio connectors which may pass Dolby Pro Logic, Digital Theatre System (DTS) or stereo signals. Also found on the back are the terminal blocks for speaker wires. They typically have impedance values of either 4 Ohms or 8 Ohms. Ensure to match the impedance values for both your speakers and receiver or damage to either portion of the sytem may occur. Cable spaghetti, sometimes known as plastic spaghetti, refers to the tangle of wires found behind and under most computers and audio/video equipment. ...
RCA Plugs for audio and video An RCA jack, also referred to as a phono connector or CINCH/AV connector, is a type of electrical connector which is commonly used in the audio/video market. ...
S/PDIF or S/P-DIF stands for Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format, also IEC 958 type II, part of IEC-60958. ...
Dolby Pro Logic is a surround sound processing technology designed to decode soundtracks encoded with Dolby Surround. ...
DTS DTS (formerly known as Digital Theater Systems), owned by DTS Inc (NASDAQ: DTSI), is a multi-channel surround sound format used for both commercial/theatrical and consumer grade applications (with significant technical differences between home and commercial/theatrical variants: the latter being a traditional ADPCM compression system and the...
In electrical engineering, Impedance is a measure of opposition to a sinusoidal electric current. ...
Video conversion and upscaling Some of the most expensive AV receivers are capable of convert video to some other mode, like composite video to S-video or vice versa. Nowadays there are also some receivers in sub-thousand dollar class, which can convert the video to component or even HDMI-signal, like the Philips DFR9000 or JVC RX-701 (Europe) or RX-702 (America). Uspcaling is a bit different thing, it means "inventing" more details to video signal, for example upscaling the 576i (interlaced) video format (720 x 576 pixels) to 720p (progressive, 1280 x 720 pixels). While converting the video from interlaced to progressive, the receivers use some kind of chip to make the conversion, like DCDi system developed by Faroudja. The term composite can refer to several different things: A dental composite is an type of tooth filling material made of a plastic matrix containing high-strength quartz filler particles. ...
S-Video (also known as Y/C) is a baseband analog video format offering a higher quality signal than composite video, but a lower quality than RGB and component video. ...
In general, a things components are its parts; the things that compose it. ...
The High-Definition Multi-media Interface (HDMI) is an industry-supported, uncompressed, all-digital audio/video interface. ...
576i is the shorthand name for a video mode. ...
720p is the shorthand name for a category of video modes. ...
DCDi (Directional Correlation Deinterlacing) is a digital enhancement method for improving image quality on low resolution images. ...
External links - A block Diagram of a typical Receiver[1]
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