This is the PR-SC886, Onkyo’s new 7.1 surround home cinema pre-amp. It’s got balanced audio-out, onboard decoding of every HD audio format, and something called ISF Video Calibration, which will bump up your picture quality by doing all the image calibration within the amp, rather than in your telly. No more changing aspect ratios through horrible menus whenever you change sources.

It’ll also upscale anything you throw at it to 1080p, and gives you every input and output you could ever wish for. The best bit of the press release is this, though: “Onkyo strongly recommends that an ISF-certified calibration technician be employed to achieve optimal image quality for each of the video inputs”. In other words – “this AV amp is better than you”.

It’s yours for £1500, in black or silver. Don’t forget to add the price of that technician onto the cost. You don’t want substandard image quality with you doing it yourself, do you?

Onkyo

Related posts: Onkyo launches first Blu-ray player: DV-BD606 | Onkyo launches top-of-range TX-SR876 and TX-NR906 receivers