SonySTR-AN1000 7.2 CH Surround Sound Home Theater 8K A/V Receiver: Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, Digital Cinema Auto Calibration IX, Bluetooth, WiFi, Google Chromecast, Spotify connect, Apple AirPlay, HDMI 2.1

The media could not be loaded. After many years of enjoying my Epson 2150 Home Cinema and my SONY STR-DN1080, I decided to upgrade to a 4K projector. I use my projector as a television, to watch movies, sports, etc., on a daily basis. Upgrading to a 4K projector required me ass well to upgrade my home theatre receiver to 4K. Both of my previous devices were 1080. I upgraded my receiver to a Sony STR-AN1000 7.2 Channel (7 x 165 Watt) Surround Sound Home Theater 8K A/V Receiver and my projector to a LG CineBeam UHD 4K projector. Immediately upon connecting my new 4K devices, I experienced difficulties. The picture was jumpy and intermittent, and I could not seamlessly switch from one input on my new home theater to another. Before the upgrade, I would regularly switch among all of my playback and streaming devices. I started panicking thinking I would have to return all of my new equipment, reconnect my old home theater receiver, and put my old projector back into the ceiling. I decided to call customer support. First, I called LG support. Then I called SONY support.The SONY tech support figured out that the SONY equipment was working properly, but that the LG projector was not receiving the signals from my various devices. He told me the problem was that I needed also to upgrade my HDMI cable to a high-speed 4k cable. That immediately freaked me out because I have a 100 ft cable embedded in a ceiling that had been finished over the cable. No way I was going to rip apart the ceiling (thousands of dollars) to replace the HDMI cable. But his insight set me in the right direction. I did some online research and came across a solution that worked perfectly. Rather than tearing up my ceiling to install a new, high-speed HDMI 4K cable, I invested $39.00 in a HDMI 2.0 Repeater. This super mini HDMI repeater works by decoding and then re-encoding the HDMI signal to a new standard HDMI signal. It also extends the range of the signal. I was now getting perfect pictures from my Firestick and Fite TV Cube and was able to switch freely between them. I changed some of the display settings in the Fire Stick and Amazon Cube. However, I could not pick up the Xfinity TV signal on my LG 4K receiver. Picking up that signal required one last piece of equipment upgrade. I called Comcast technical support and determined that swapping out my Xfinity 1080 boxes for 4K boxes was an option available to me. Therefore, I returned my Xfinity 1080 cable box and swapped it out for an Xfinity 4K cable TV box. Problem solved. Now, I am receiving a perfect 4K image on the LG from all devices, and I can easily switch from one to the other.Now, let's talk about the SONY STR-AN1000 features.SONY STR-AN1000This is a powerful and well-engineered home theater receiver. For me, the only reason to buy this receiver at this point in time was to upgrade my TV/ home theater watching from 1080 to 4K. My SONY 1080 still works fine. I have to figure out what I am going to do with it. The surround sound is awesome on the new STR-AN1000. It has this new Dolby Speaker Virtualization sound field simulation that totally immerses you in surround sound. You can control the SONY STR-AN1000 with your smartphone using the SONY Music Center App. There are plenty of digital and music streaming options. You have multi-room audio and video options using zone 2 and zone 3 outputs. Six HDMI inputs allow you to connect all of your media playback and streaming devices – Blue Ray player, Fire Stick, Fire TV Cube, ROKU Streaming stick, Cable/satellite TV Box, etc. Like my previous STR-DN1080, I can connect 7 speaker sets, including 2 sub-woofers. You can change the settings or switch from one input source to another easily. The on-screen display lets you make adjustments to your settings while looking at your TV screen. You can connect to the internet wirelessly or via an ethernet port. The only major feature this receiver is lacking is a phono input. I don’t mind that because I have another receiver from which to connect my turntables or record players. The remote control is much smaller than previous SONY home theater receiver remotes, making it more user-friendly and easier to understand. The Audio Return Channel (ARC and eARC) allows you to set your system up without the need for an optical audio cable. In my case, that means I don’t have to run an extra cable into the ceiling for the audio to work because the ARC and eARC transmit the audio signal. This receiver is capable of upscaling your video to both 4K and 8K. However, in my case, I found it necessary to get an Xfinity 4K cable box to watch my Xfinity programming. I am totally, 100 percent pleased with my SONY STR-AN1000 4K/8K home theater receiver. This is the fourth SONY home theater receiver I have owned. I have no complaints. The picture quality passed through from all of my playback devices to my LG 4K projector is stunning. There are so many other features to this receiver; however, those are best explained by an audio/video expert. There are many such reviews available online. But if you are a layperson like I am and you want to know whether this STR-AN1000 home theater is a good investment, my answer, based on a few weeks of viewing and my over a decade of experience with other home theater receivers, is that this is a very good investment. The quality and features you are getting are well worth the purchase price, and I am confident you will be watching a TV or projector hooked up to this home theater system for many years to come. I highly recommend it.

I wanted to upgrade from my older receiver to a Dolby Atmos capable surround sound system. This Sony received terrific reviews and was relatively affordable. Coupling this to a new mini-LED TV and to a new 5.1.2 speaker setup gives me a rich sound experience whether watching movies or listening to music. I especially like the AFD feature (Auto-Format Direct) that “automatically detects and decodes the input audio format, ensuring the best possible sound reproduction without adding any artificial surround effects.” I have no need to manually select DTS-X or Dolby etc. according yo what movie I am watching. This is an excellent receiver at an affordable price point, especially if you can get it when on sale.

INSTALLATION AND CALIBRATIONMy previous Denon AVR which was older than 10 years did feature multi-channel sound separation but unfortunately may have had a capacitor fail because one of rear sound channels was no longer working and the AVR would go into a power-down/safe mode with flashing red power LED after a few minutes of use. Not really inclined to open the unit and attempt a self-repair involving soldering, I opted to upgrade the AVR to a newer Dolby Atmos-capable receiver, the Sony STR AN1000.Installing the AN1000 into my existing home theater set up was relatively easy, if you don’t account for crawling and stretching out on the living room wood floor and reconnecting existing speaker wire and subwoofer connections. Once the speakers were all connected, I used the calibration microphone and stand that comes with the AN1000 to establish the relative sound fields for each of the speakers. The graphical user interface from the Sony receiver to my Sony 4k TV was quite helpful in double-checking the accuracy of the calibration settings, which were slightly off in a few cases – particularly the distance of the subwoofers to the TV which for some reason added about 12 feet when they were only about 2 feet from the TV. When calibrating the unit, it is important to have a measuring device to verify the distance and height of all of your speakers, the height of your TV screen and the height of your ceiling. My home theater set up is in my living room and adjacent dining room that together have a 19-ft cathedral ceiling, so the acoustics can be quite pleasing.The other disconcerting thing about the graphical interface for the speaker setup was that it doesn’t give the user and option for smaller (bookshelf-sized) rear surrounds and only displays large speakers if your left and right surrounds are large. My front and side surrounds are large Sony tower speakers and given how my dining room is set up it doesn’t make sense to add additional tower speakers.CONNECTING AN APPLE TV 4K – Lack of the Dolby Vision SupportI initially connected my AppleTV 4k set top box directly to the Sony AN1000 using an 8k-rated HDMI cable only to discover that the receiver would not pass through a Dolby Vision signal to the AppleTV 4k which display 4k SDR only. When I went online to see if this was a unique issue or whether other users had encountered this, I discovered that unfortunately this is a known issue that as far as I could tell that neither Sony nor Apple have yet to resolve. So, I was forced to reconnect the Apple TV 4k directly to the Sony TV once again. Sony claims to support Dolby Vision through the AN1000 but this is simply not the case unless there is a solution or work-around that they have published as of this writing that I have missed.DISPLAYING THE SOUND FIELD BEING USEDThe Sony AN1000 does have a nifty 360 Spatial Sound setting which comes in handy when watching older films whether they are streamed or from a Blu-ray player. That said whatever the current sound field being used is displayed on the front display panel of the receiver but is so small as to be unreadable especially considering that the user may be sitting some 10 feet away from the receiver and TV screen and not inclined to keep getting out of their chair to kneel down and get within a few inches of the receiver’s front display to see what the settings are.Attempting to verify the sound field by using the included Sony remote for the receiver is not much help since it hardly ever displays the information. Using the Sony TV’s remote isn’t much better since the option in the audio setting it displays is “Dolby Audio” not “Dolby Atmos” or “Dolby Digital Plus” or other sound fields/codecs like “DTS”.OVERALL PERFORMANCE - SOUND CLARITY AND SURROUND EFFECTSDespite some of the aforementioned annoying user interface issues, the surround sound effects of the AN1000 when in Dolby Atmos or using the Sony 360 Spatial Sound setting is quite impressive and to my ear sounds much crisper than my previous Denon multi-channel AVR. Initially my subwoofers were putting out probably a bit too much thundering low frequency bass; so, I actually had to reset the levels on them down a bit. This was quite noticeable when playing the 4k UHD Dolby Atmos stream of Blade Runner, for example and some other action films with explosions and other pyrotechnics.When playing the tornado scene from The Wizard of Oz, you really do get the sense that wind is whipping around you from every corner of the room. Other films that have been adept at incorporating Dolby Atmos will sometimes startle the viewer with offscreen sound effects that was made by another character that soon makes an appearance. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are very good examples of this.I also tested the AN1000 with different genres (classical, opera, jazz, rock) of music on Amazon Music and was quite pleased with the crisp, clear sound of instruments and vocals.FINAL WORDTo say that the AN1000 has horsepower and can create a dynamic and immersive theater sound experience in an averaged-sized living room is an understatement. This is a feature-rich and powerful home theater receiver and for most living room/family room/bonus room situations, the Sony STR AN1000 will be more than suitable for what you will need to create an entertaining surround sound environment.