What Ant said - I use my receiver for 5.1 and for stereo. It's an old amp now, and has a button on the front to force whatever you're putting through it into stereo. Might be best to download the manual from the manufacturer's site if they do one and check from there...
I have the Onkyo HT-R393, it has a different menu set-up to Ant's, but does exactly the same thing in letting you choose which speakers are attached to it. Until recently I only had front left and right connected, due to moving and being too lazy to run speaker cable where I needed it, and had the amp set to 2.1 without having to change any of the source audio.
Perfect! Thanks (and to graph and matt).
So onkyo are OK then? Sounds like a brand of yoghurt, as long as music doesn't sound like it's got added Fraudulide R then I'll be happy.
I did find the manual earlier to find out about pass through when the amp is off. Didn't think to look up down mixing :$
Onkyo seem pretty popular and I remember when I was looking fairly priced. No issues with mine. Got a reasonable deal on it a few years ago. Never actually bought a decent speaker setup though.
Cool. I'll decide if I can face spending the money next week.
Onkyo was and is a good brand, I wish I had purchased their 6 disc CD player years ago.
6 discs at once? That'd sound horrible.
Damnit, I'm sure that amp was £150 when I looked at it originally. £180 now :(
That says £205 here. Are you reading these properly?
What, Kos is a VIP? Pffffff
I joined when I got my amp. Meant I got whatever percent they were offering at the time, plus another £10 and it was on sale. I don't think the guys behind the counter (I actually went into a real shop!!) appreciated all the reductions I got.
Like Ant says, I'm a VIP so get 10% off on clearance items.
Stop dithering and get some beats :@
Also, I've been put off Onkyo because of past overheating and HDMI board issues - but they might've fixed that nowadays...
So you're saying get the yamaha? Are they any good? I thought they made motorbikes.
I think they make so many things, even they've probably lost track - musical instruments, motorbikes, ATVs, electronics... Mind you at least they're not Samsung, those guys make rather large boats (e.g.: ferries) as well :-&
Anyway in terms of being a fanboi, I tend to prefer Yamaha to Onkyo and DM (Denon-Marantz, same mothership); but if you go quite a bit further up, then Anthem and a few others rear their head as well.
I just want my music to sound good and be able to hear the dialogue in 5.1 sources, where both sky box and raspberry pi fuck up the down mix so much I have to adjust the volume every two minutes.