Save Onkyo TX-SR707 7.2-Channel A/V Surround Home Theater Receiver

For the audio side of things, the 707 is fantastic. Seriously, it's a superb piece of kit in this regard. However, you can read plenty of reviews about how great it sounds, so I'd like to highlight a problem I have found with the video side of things.

Bottom Line: If you send the 707 1080p/24 material over HDMI, the 707 will introduce intermittent video stuttering or frame drops. A real easy test of this is to watch the Layer Cake Blu-Ray in 1080p/24 (of course, on a display that can natively display 1080p/24). The film's first opening minutes, it uses several panning shots which really highlight this particular issue. My recommendation is to bypass the 707 when it comes to touching any HDMI video signal you which to preserve.

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I've emailed Onkyo directly and they don't acknowledge this issue as a known problem. I've also sent this receiver to my local repair center in Mountain View where it sat for three months before being returned. The local repair center couldn't figure out the issue, so they had sent it to the regional repair center. The regional repair center replaced the HDMI board and upgraded the firmware from 1.09 to 1.14. When I received the repaired unit back, I tried the following:

1) If I disable the video processor by the SKIP option (see the manual) and set the receiver to pass-through video signals, 1080p/24 works fine when coming from my Oppo BDP-83. However, I receive occasional and intermittent (non-repeatable) complete video dropouts (i.e. - blank screen) for a few seconds. This might only happen once during an entire disc, but that's once too many times in my book. Also, when using my Popcorn Hour A-110, I get video dropouts as well (when using any material, but I mostly watch 720p/60 material on this source) but much more frequently than with my Oppo.

2) Since I believed the video dropouts were unacceptable and since I assumed that my player had actually been fixed because the HDMI board had been swapped out and the firmware upgraded, I took a chance and set the 707's video processor back to USE instead of SKIP. What did this result in? The return of the 1080p/24 frame drops/stutters.

3) I then decided to get clever, and tried to use a HDMI splitter to split the video signal feeding out of my DVDO VP50 and send one signal (video) directly to my projector and the other signal (audio) to the 707. Unfortunately, the VP50 can't pass out high resolution audio formats, so this became an effort in futility. However, I did notice that I would get frequent audio dropouts on the 707 if I didn't have 707's video processor set to USE instead of SKIP. Try it for yourself, but trying to use the 707 for HDMI audio processing only doesn't seem to work right unless you configure it's video processor to USE.

4) I also tried another match up using the splitter: since my only source for 1080p/24 is my Oppo, I tried running the HDMI signal from the Oppo to my splitter, which then fed into one of the HDMI inputs on the 707 and the other output fed into my VP50. I also connected my other sources to the 707 and had the 707's HDMI out feed into one of the VP50's inputs. With this particular configuration, I noticed chaos again with the audio during playback on the Oppo no matter if the video processor was set to USE or SKIP. The 707's display had its HDMI indicator continually blinking. The only way I could stabilize the audio was if I disconnected the HDMI out of the 707 during playback. Weird, huh?

As a result of none of the above test cases providing me with the results I desire, I'm having to upgrade my VP50 to a DVDO Duo in order to bypass the 707 altogether with regards to the video signal. Hopefully I can use the Duo's dedicated HDMI audio output and feed that directly to the 707 (with no other connections made to the 707). Given what I know now about the 707's video processor oddities, I think I'll set it to USE to be on the safe side.

It's really sad that I'm having to buy another product in order to get the 707 to function the way I want. However, given that I enjoy using it as a pre-amp, coupled with the fact that it was in the shop for three months, I'm going to stick with it. If anything, it'll be nice to have a newer video processor that is a bit more future proof than the VP50.Get more detail about Onkyo TX-SR707 7.2-Channel A/V Surround Home Theater Receiver.