★★★★★ 4
Superb, Crisp Surround Sound. A few issues.
INSTALLATION AND CALIBRATION
My previous Denon AVR which was older than 10 years did feature multi-channel sound separation but unfortunately may have had a capacitor fail because one of rear sound channels was no longer working and the AVR would go into a power-down/safe mode with flashing red power LED after a few minutes of use. Not really inclined to open the unit and attempt a self-repair involving soldering, I opted to upgrade the AVR to a newer Dolby Atmos-capable receiver, the Sony STR AN1000.
Installing the AN1000 into my existing home theater set up was relatively easy, if you don’t account for crawling and stretching out on the living room wood floor and reconnecting existing speaker wire and subwoofer connections. Once the speakers were all connected, I used the calibration microphone and stand that comes with the AN1000 to establish the relative sound fields for each of the speakers. The graphical user interface from the Sony receiver to my Sony 4k TV was quite helpful in double-checking the accuracy of the calibration settings, which were slightly off in a few cases – particularly the distance of the subwoofers to the TV which for some reason added about 12 feet when they were only about 2 feet from the TV. When calibrating the unit, it is important to have a measuring device to verify the distance and height of all of your speakers, the height of your TV screen and the height of your ceiling. My home theater set up is in my living room and adjacent dining room that together have a 19-ft cathedral ceiling, so the acoustics can be quite pleasing.
The other disconcerting thing about the graphical interface for the speaker setup was that it doesn’t give the user and option for smaller (bookshelf-sized) rear surrounds and only displays large speakers if your left and right surrounds are large. My front and side surrounds are large Sony tower speakers and given how my dining room is set up it doesn’t make sense to add additional tower speakers.
CONNECTING AN APPLE TV 4K – Lack of the Dolby Vision Support
I initially connected my AppleTV 4k set top box directly to the Sony AN1000 using an 8k-rated HDMI cable only to discover that the receiver would not pass through a Dolby Vision signal to the AppleTV 4k which display 4k SDR only. When I went online to see if this was a unique issue or whether other users had encountered this, I discovered that unfortunately this is a known issue that as far as I could tell that neither Sony nor Apple have yet to resolve. So, I was forced to reconnect the Apple TV 4k directly to the Sony TV once again. Sony claims to support Dolby Vision through the AN1000 but this is simply not the case unless there is a solution or work-around that they have published as of this writing that I have missed.
DISPLAYING THE SOUND FIELD BEING USED
The Sony AN1000 does have a nifty 360 Spatial Sound setting which comes in handy when watching older films whether they are streamed or from a Blu-ray player. That said whatever the current sound field being used is displayed on the front display panel of the receiver but is so small as to be unreadable especially considering that the user may be sitting some 10 feet away from the receiver and TV screen and not inclined to keep getting out of their chair to kneel down and get within a few inches of the receiver’s front display to see what the settings are.
Attempting to verify the sound field by using the included Sony remote for the receiver is not much help since it hardly ever displays the information. Using the Sony TV’s remote isn’t much better since the option in the audio setting it displays is “Dolby Audio” not “Dolby Atmos” or “Dolby Digital Plus” or other sound fields/codecs like “DTS”.
OVERALL PERFORMANCE - SOUND CLARITY AND SURROUND EFFECTS
Despite some of the aforementioned annoying user interface issues, the surround sound effects of the AN1000 when in Dolby Atmos or using the Sony 360 Spatial Sound setting is quite impressive and to my ear sounds much crisper than my previous Denon multi-channel AVR. Initially my subwoofers were putting out probably a bit too much thundering low frequency bass; so, I actually had to reset the levels on them down a bit. This was quite noticeable when playing the 4k UHD Dolby Atmos stream of Blade Runner, for example and some other action films with explosions and other pyrotechnics.
When playing the tornado scene from The Wizard of Oz, you really do get the sense that wind is whipping around you from every corner of the room. Other films that have been adept at incorporating Dolby Atmos will sometimes startle the viewer with offscreen sound effects that was made by another character that soon makes an appearance. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are very good examples of this.
I also tested the AN1000 with different genres (classical, opera, jazz, rock) of music on Amazon Music and was quite pleased with the crisp, clear sound of instruments and vocals.
FINAL WORD
To say that the AN1000 has horsepower and can create a dynamic and immersive theater sound experience in an averaged-sized living room is an understatement. This is a feature-rich and powerful home theater receiver and for most living room/family room/bonus room situations, the Sony STR AN1000 will be more than suitable for what you will need to create an entertaining surround sound environment.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2024