It wasn’t long ago that the average home cinema was considered amazing if it featured a 28” screen, VHS cassette player and stereo sound amplification. How times have changed! The technology behind electrical devices such as television has improved so much over the past five years that it is hard to believe people watched cathode-ray tube powered televisions at all. These days, most homes are equipped with a huge flat panel television set, DVD or Bluray player and an audio system which delivers 5.1 or even 7.1 channels of exceptionally sounding audio. Today’s home cinema systems feature a wide range of functions, so many that it can sometimes be difficult to figure out how to operate them. To help simplify things, home cinema receivers are available to replace a lot of individual components, meaning all devices of a system can be controlled with the use of just one remote control.

Home cinema receivers are essentially the media hub of a home theatre system. These receivers are also known as audio visual receivers (or AVR’s) and are responsible for providing power to each of the speakers used by a 7.1 channel system. Each of the volume levels of speakers powered in this way can be individually adjusted to ensure that the sound is balanced perfectly. Altering the volume levels is often as easy as picking up the cinema receiver remote and pressing a few buttons. A home cinema receiver is quite literally the brains behind a modern home entertainment system with all features accessible from its remote.

The very latest designs of home cinema receivers have a myriad of functions and so many new features which quickly become taken for granted. It wasn’t too long ago that Laserdisc’s were the peak in home cinema technology, these days an individual can download a film to their iPod and stream it directly to their home cinema receiver without the need for any wires. Advanced networking capabilities which are provided by using wireless technologies are becoming commonplace. Some receivers also support the use of a home personal computer as a media streaming device, meaning all of an individual’s movies can be stored on a PC and streamed wirelessly to the television in their living room with just one click of a button.

Functionality such as stereoscopic 3D playback, iPod streaming, native video up-scaling and advanced theatre effects for audio are all features which people expect the latest home cinema receivers to have. The breadth of scope which these receivers offer is simple outstanding.