It's been awhile since I've had the opportunity to play with a new AV receiver and I must say that things have definitely progressed of late. This Onkyo gem has more bells and whistles than ever but the great thing about it is that it was easy to set up and it operates great right out of the box. Mind you --- you may need help just to get it out of the box --- 55 pounds --- yikes. Andy, our installer from Audio Impact, recalled his days working in a retail store when they would use the "finger test" to convince cusomers of the quality of one receiver over the other. This meant lifting the front of the unit with one or two fingers. Can you even lift 55 lbs. with one hand?

In this review I'm going to focus on things about this receiver that are different from the everyday home theater application. At the end I'll include the specs so you can see that it has every mode, function and connection that you'll ever need or see on any other unit in this price range.

Firstly --- let me quote Onkyo's own description of some of these features and we'll pick that apart for our test purposes:

"9.2 Audio channels expand the possibilities both for multi-zone playback and for the new surround dimensions of Audyssey DSX™ and Dolby® Pro Logic® IIz. Advanced networking capability, meanwhile, lets you bring streaming internet radio and PC-based music files into your home entertainment set-up. "

Sentence 1 - 9.2 Audio channels.
OK, I personally don't have that many speakers in my system so what interested me is the bit about multi-zone playback. So that's what I did. I'm running a 5.1 home theater plus 2 separate stereo audio zones (outdoor and office). This means I don't need a separate multroom audio system to have music in these other rooms. One of these zones can have another TV screen too so it is actually a separate A/V zone. And the zone control is great. It allows separate sources in every zone and you can preset the starting volume level as well as max. volume in each zone. In fact when you put the home theater to bed (unit on standby), the other 2 zones are still active.

Sentence 2 - Advanced networking capability
I'm obviously into networking since we have our business at home and work continuously on the internet. Any my absolute favorite internet magic app is Pandora internet radio. But, I also have a fairly large music collection residing on a network storage device (NAS). I was eager to put the NR-3007 to the test so one of the first things I did was to plug it into our home network via the ethernet connection. I had to look up a few instructions in the manual but basically the receiver just connected to the network and looked around for devices. It found the music files on the NAS device once I set that up to share files via it's built in media server function. It found my laptop once I set that up to share my Windows Media Player. It found Pandora and as soon as I logged in with my user name and password it let me play my personal stations at will. It also connects to Rhapsody, Sirius Internet Radio and vTuner. You can also play music from a USB device by the way. So that just eliminated the need for another device in my system --- a devoted media server. Nice!

Needless to say --- I'd be a happy camper with just these two features. Add to that a full functioning 140 watt per channel home theater receiver with state of the art Audio and Video processing.

And the sound and video quality is a good as it gets as far as my eyes and ears are concerned.

I have the NR-3007 located on an av rack in the closet and it's running 16 hours a day --- all channels pumping out music --- without dedicated cooling (louver doors on the closet is all). So far no overheating problems at all.

By the way, one thing that is a must to take advantage of the multizone features is to have an RF Universal Remote so you can walk around the house and adjust volume and sources etc. Especially with the receiver mounted in a closet.

OK, I know you'd like to hear all the gory details but I'm afraid I'm limited to being a user rather than a techy so you'll have to settle for my opinion of the sound and picture quality from the NR-3007. It's good and has more audio and video modes than I can count. What more do you need?

Here is an official list of features:

Amplifier
# Channels	9.2
Power (8ohms 20-20kHz 0.08%) /Ch	-
Power (8ohms 20-20kHz 0.05%) /Ch	140W
THX Certified	(Ultra2 Plus)
Continuous 6ohms Rated
Certified 4ohms performance
All Discrete Circuitry
3-Stage Inverted Darlington Circuitry
Dual PUSH-PULL Design
Independent Block Construction (Amp/Preprocessor)
Toroidal Transformer	-
Independent Power Supply	(4 Transformers)
Bi-amp Capability For Front
BTL Capability For Front
Processing
DOLBY Decoder	DD Plus, TrueHD
DTS Decoder	DTS-HD Master Audio
Dolby PLIIz
ONKYO GAME Surround Modes
DTS Surround Sensation Speaker / Headphone
Neural Surround
THX Processing Mode
Audyssey Dynamic EQ
Audyssey Dynamic Volume
Audyssey DSX
Direct/Pure Mode	/
Music Optimizer
192K/24 Bit DACs	(Burr-Brown)
VLSC
isf Certified Calibration Control
Connectivity
Audio I/O	8 / 2
Phono Input
Digital Audio IN (OPT/COAX)	3 / 3
Digital Audio OUT (OPT/COAX)	-
Composite I/O	5 / 1
S-Video I/O	5 / 1
Component Video I/O	3 / 1
Front-Panel A/V	L / R / V / S
Front-Panel Optical
Front-Panel Portable input (stereo mini jack)	-
HDMI I/O	7 (6 rear+1 front) / 2 (simultaneous out)
HDMI Version	V1.3a Repeater
Component Video Upconversion
Analog To HDMI UpConversion
1080i Upscaling	(HQV Reon)
1080p Upscaling	(HQV Reon)
Multi-Channel Input	7.1ch
Analog Pre-Outs	9.2ch
Speaker A/+B	-
Powered Zone2
Zone 2 Line Out
Zone 2 Video Out
Zone 3 Line Out
U-Port
iPod Ready	(optional UP-A1)
HD Radio Ready	(optional UP-HT1)
XM Radio Ready	-
SIRIUS Radio Ready
Internet Radio Capable	(Pandora, Rhapsody, vTuner, Sirius Internet Radio)
Streaming Audio From PC
Streaming Audio From USB memory
Integration Access
RS-232
IR Input
Ethernet
ONKYO-RI System Control
12V Trigger	(Zone2/Zone3)
Miscellaneous
Pre-Pro/Learning Remote	/
Back-Lit Remote
On Screen Remote Programming
Bi-directional Remote Setup via GUI
Activity Based Remote
Color-Coded Speaker Terminals
Auto Speaker Calibration W/Mic.	(Audyssey MultEQ XT)
OSD Out	(via HDMI)
Solid Aluminum Front
Warranty	2 YEARS

And here are the published specs:

Enjoy!