Home Theater Commander

I REMEMBER my first flagship A/V receiver like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, and Onkyo’s TX-DS989, which sold for a cool $3,200 and featured seven channels of built-in amplification plus support for the latest, greatest THX Surround EX and DTS-ES codecs was every home theater enthusiast’s dream. With rear surround speakers now added to the mix, a home theater could actually match the arrays found in cinemas.

It’s now nineteen years later and the home theater market has continued to evolve. Back in 2015, I lowered the ceiling of my theater and installed four overhead speakers to get set up for Dolby Atmos. The central piece of hardware driving my system then was a Marantz AV8802A surround preamplifier-processor, a model that offered 11.2 channels of processing and an optional Auro-3D upgrade.

'The AV8805 is for enthusiasts who want to address every available speaker option.'

As is usually the case in the A/V world, upgrades offering even more goodies were soon to come. Case in point: the new Marantz AV8805 ($4,499), an A/V preamplifier sporting 13 processing channels and