Posted by Will on 08/26/06 18:03

I'm looking for a receiver, or separate discrete switching devices, that
will switch up to five S-Video inputs, and five optical audio inputs. What
are some high quality options under $500? I do not need a power amplifier.

Starting with optical audio, I've seen these all over the place on price,
from $5 cheap plastic switches that take TOSLINK inputs, to $100 Radio Shack
powered devices that switch up to eight TOSLinks, to high end receivers that
switch TOSLINK. My first question is does optical audio switching really
benefit much from the quality of the switching device? Given that the
signal is optical, other than possibly attenuating the signal too much, will
a cheap switcher do as good a job as an expensive one? An important
requirement for this application is that the receiver should not decode the
DTS or Dolby signals but should just switch and pass through the signals to
the output.

In terms of S-Video, this appears to be very sensitive to the quality of the
switching equipment. I tried using some cheaper switchers for S-Video, and
they horribly degraded the signal. The same signals looked decent on a
Harmon Kardon AVR300, but unfortunately that receiver doesn't support five
devices.

I see that Harmon Kardon has an AVR 645 receiver that comes close to my
requirement, but that is outside my target price range.

--
Will

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