Arcam FMJ AVR600… Sounds pretty good.
The beast that you see above is the FMJ AVR600, a powerful new mobile phone AV receiver for your home cinema. I mean, if “you” happen to have a large disposable income and a desire to experience films and the like in the highest possible quality. I imagine if you were to watch the Blu-ray version of the 2004 film Downfall through this, it’d feel almost as if you were there in Hitler’s bunker with him, perhaps as a minor general or the work experience kid who everyone ignores.
Under the hood there’s plenty of power and support for all things high-end: it supports DTS-HD Master, DTS High Resolution, Dolby TrueHD, and Dolby Digital Plus audio decoding – so the makers can’t guarantee that it won’t sneer at you if you dare listen to anything that was only made in crappy old NICAM stereo. There are, of course, stacks of HDMI holes – 5 inputs and 2 outputs.
One cool feature is that it can “supply music to three zones simultaneously”, so if you live in some sort of space-house with speakers in every room, the FMJ has you covered.
My favourite feature though is that it features a new “Dolby Volume” technology, that is seemingly designed to specifically tone down loud adverts. It will apparently normalise the volume coming out of your TV so that adverts don’t start blaring out as they invariably do – this sounds particularly useful if you’re watching anything on a Satellite channel, where (at risk of exaggerating slightly) every single advert is for those bloody insurance comparison websites. Until someone invents a technology to let you punch people through the TV screen, this is the next best thing.
This isn’t all – it also has a built in DAB digital and FM radio, iPod and MP3 support (presumably a USB port) and even network support for internet radio. Nice.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? The only catch is that it’ll set you back a cool £2300 when it becomes available in November.
Related Posts: Sony AV Receivers | How about a nice telly to go with it?
