Onkyo TX-SR576 review

Weaknesses
Like any amplifier, the Onkyo TX-SR576 gets as hot as hell during operation, and it kicks out a fair amount of heat even when it's in standby. We'd suggest that you place it in an open area, away from the rest of your electronics equipment. This isn't much of a problem, but if you're short for space, it's probably worth bearing it in mind.

If we had any real criticism we'd say that the auto-setup procedure didn't quite nail the level of the rear surround channels -- we thought they were a touch too loud and slightly overwhelming. Generally, people will sit closer to their rear channels than the fronts, and while this is bad speaker placement, the layout of most people's living rooms make this the only practical setup. Speaker levels can, however, be manually adjusted with relative ease.

The lack of built-in decoding for DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD might put some people off, but it really shouldn't. Your Blu-ray player should be able to decode these signals and pass them out of the player, via HDMI, as linear PCM. There's no quality penalty for sending audio this way, as long as the Blu-ray player doesn't downmix to two-channel or something silly. Before you buy though, check your Blu-ray player can send audio data in this way -- look for the DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD logos -- or that it has analogue 5.1 outputs.

Conclusion
All in all, it's hard to find any reasons not to recommend the SR576. It's big, bold and beautiful and crammed to the limit with power. Setting it up is child's play and using it's hassle-free too. You might prefer a decoder with TrueHD and DTS-HD support, and if that's the case, we can recommend Onkyo's higher-end models.

There isn't that much competition at this price -- the only things likely to come close are all-in-one systems designed as a single package, but those rarely handle music and movies as well as this Onkyo does. It's a long way ahead of similarly priced competition, and if you already have speakers, it's an even better deal.

Edited by Nick Hide