STR-DA5200ES

ES 7.1 Channel Surround Sound A/V Receiver

NEW Key Features

Optimized for Blu-ray Disc(tm) and Other Compatible HD Sources 7.1 Channel Audio/Video Receiver (120 watts x 7;8 ohms, 20Hz-20 kHz, 0.09% THD) Cross Media Bar Inspired Graphic User Interface Faroudja(R) DCDi Cinema Up Scaling Technology1 Picture-in-Picture for Monitoring Multi-Zone Output or External Video Source Accepts 1080p video signal and 8ch linear PCM through HDMI Video up-scaling to HDMI (up to 1080p) with HDMI "Active Intelligence"1 USB Input for Connecting Portable Audio Players2 Digital Cinema Auto Calibration with stereo mic XM Connect-and-Play with Neural 5.1 Surround Sound Decoding3

Key Technologies

Optimized for Blu-ray DiscTM and Other HD Sources: The STR-DA5200ES is engineered to be the ideal Blu-ray Disc A/V
receiver, fully compatible with the Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc Player. Superior video switching and audio performance which will work with many of todays demanding HD sources. Three High Definition Media Interface (HDMI) inputs are capable of accepting resolutions up to 1080p, offering the full video quality that Blu-ray Disc format can deliver4. For audio, the STRDA5200 offers full compatibility with Blu-ray Disc formats linear PCM (uncompressed) output, producing up to eight channels of high quality audio reproduction.
Cross Media Bar Inspired Graphic User Interface An on-screen menu system that simplifies the most complex
operations of an A/V receiver for home theater applications. This advanced menu system incorporates icons, an easy to follow tree system and a blending technique so users know exactly where they are amongst the various settings while still watching their main video source (up to 1080i).
Faroudja DCDi CINEMA Chipset for Up Scaling to 1080p: IC processor developed by Faroudja, and first used by Sony,
which will up scale1 and up convert all video signals (less than 1080p) to 1080p via HDMI4. This latest chipset corrects image jaggedness; reduces block noise and reproduces true to original colors. The end result is a beautiful and smooth high definition image.
Picture-in-Picture for Monitoring Multi-Zone Output or External Video Source Enjoy the convenience of picture-inpicture capabilities in the STR-DA5200ES 7.1 Channel A/V Receiver; another benefit of the Faroudja DCDi CINEMA chipset. With an additional video input, a customer can connect a baby monitor or security camera and monitor room activity or view a 2nd video source while still watching their main video source.
HDMI Up Scaling1 Composite, s-video and component video sources can be up scaled to 1080p then converted to HDMI
output, minimizing the number of connections needed from the receiver to the television display. HDMI supports resolutions up to 1080p and enables both HD video and uncompressed streaming audio to be transmitted through a single cable.

Supplied Stereo Mic

Features
Up Conversion: Yes (HDMI Up Conversion from Component, S-Video and Composite to 1080p) Up Scaling: Yes (HDMI Up Scaling up to 1080p) RCA Audio Input(s): 5 RCA Audio Output(s): 2 Multi-Channel Input(s): 1 (Rear, 7.1 Channel) AC Outlet: 2 (Rear) Switched Headphone Output(s): Yes (Front- Gold) Subwoofer Output(s): 1 (Rear) HD Component Video Input(s): 3 (Rear) HD Component Video Output(s): 1 (Rear) Antenna Terminal (AM Loop): 1 (Rear) Antenna Terminal (FM 75 Ohm): 1 (Rear) HDMI Connection Input(s): 3 (Rear) HDMI Connection Output(s): 1 (Rear) Repeater
Dolby Digital Decoding: Yes Dolby Pro Logic II Decoding: Yes DTS 96/24 Decoding: Yes DTS NEO:6 Decoding: Yes Dolby Digital EX Decoding: Yes Dolby Pro Logic IIX Decoding: Yes Amplification Relocation: Yes Digital Cinema Sound Technology: Yes Dolby Pro Logic Decoding: Yes dts-ES Decoding: Yes

Hardware

Remote Control: Yes- Advanced Learning/Pre Programed
Power Consumption (in Operation): 480 W Power Requirements: AC 120V, 60 Hz Power Consumption (in Standby): 1 W

Convenience

A/B Speaker Switch: A / B / A+B On Screen Display: Yes HDMI Technology: Intelligent A/V Selector Digital Cinema Auto Calibration: Yes (MicMono)

Dimensions

Weight: 34 lbs. 3 oz. (15.5kg) Measurements: 17" x 7" x 17" (430mm x175mm x 430mm)

Specifications

Speaker
Center Speaker Terminal: Yes Speaker Terminal Type: Screw Binding Posts (A & B)

Supplied Accessories

Instruction Manual FM Wire Antenna AM Loop Antenna Size AA Batteries: Way LCD Pre Programmed Macro capable Learning Remote Commander Remote Control 1 Basic Remote Commader Color: Black UPC Code: 027242687707
1.HDMI compatible HDTV required. Image quality and upscaling results may vary. 2.Compatibility may vary and is not guaranteed for all players. 3. Requires satellite radio subscription and radio antenna sold separately. Antenna placement restrictions apply. 4.Requires HDTV with HDMI connector and equivalent display capability. Image quality will vary. 2006 Sony Electronics Inc. Sony, Remote Commander and Digital Cinema Sound are trademarks of Sony. Dolby, Dolby Digital, ProLogic are registered trademarks of Dolby Laboratories. dts is a trademark of Digital Theater Systems, L.P. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. All Weights and Measures are approximate.
Impedance: 8 Ohm Channel Power Rating: 120Watts X 7 Amp Power(8 ohms, 20Hz-20Khz, 0.09% THD) Sound Fields: Cinema - 4; Music - 8; Auto Format Decoding - 12; 2 Channel - 1 Zones: 3 Zone/3 Room Tuner Type: Auto Tuning, Direct Tuning, Station Name, Presets 30/30/30 (XM/FM/AM)
AM/FM Memory Presets: 30 FM - 30 AM XM Connect and Play Compatible: Neural 5.1 Surround Sound Decoding XM Memory Presets: 30

Inputs and Outputs

S-Video Output(s): 3 (2 Rear/1 Monitor Out) Composite Video Output(s): 3 (Rear-1 Monitor Output, 2 Video Outputs) Optical Audio Output(s): 2 (Rear) S-Video Input(s): 5 (1 Front, 4 Rear) Composite Video Input(s): 5 (1 Front, 4 Rear) Coaxial Audio Digital Input(s): 3 (Rear) Optical Audio Input(s): 5 (1 Front, 4 Rear)
Please visit the Dealer Network for current information at www.sony.com/dn
Sony Electronics Inc. 16530 Via Esprillo San Diego, CA 92127 800.222.7669 www.sony.com

Last Updated: 04/10/2007

Sony STR-DA5200ES A/V Receiver

by Daniel Kumin

December 2006
Sony's latest top-of-the-line A/V receiver, the STR-DA5200ES, might more fairly be labeled a V/A receiver, being one of the most video-intensive encountered so far. Among its boasts is the slickest onscreen display we've seen in a receiver (its style derives from PSP/PS3 game designs), the most powerful video scaler, and a host of video capabilities, including in-receiver PIP processing. Of course, there's a long list of audio goodies too, among them precise auto-calibration and a range of surround and two-channel options, including one mode optimized for portables such as an iPod or, this being a Sony, a MiniDisc player. (I'm sure you've got one of those in the closet.) The receiver is also XM-ready, including decoding for XM Neural 5.1-channel broadcasts. On first glance the Sony STR-DA5200ES A/V receiver looks like any other, but with an exceptionally clean front-panel layout, thanks to most functions being accessible strictly from the system remote a conventional-looking, button-based affair. The back panel is dense, of course, packed with the three HDMI digital A/V inputs of the well-dressed receiver and all the component, S-video, and digital-audio ports you could want. After hookup, my first move was to run Sony's auto-setup routine. The supplied stereo calibration mike, shaped like a sawed-off "T," yielded impressive spatial precision, calculating my speaker distances to the inch I checked with a tape measure! (Triangulation is the secret, of course.) It set all my speakers to "large," but since they're all quite able down to 60 Hz or lower, I 've got no major beef I rechecked with tiny sats, and the receiver dutifully reset to "small." Levels were all within a dB or so of my handheld SPL meter (which may be less accurate than the Sony), except for the subwoofer, which was auto-balanced about 6 dB strong to both my ear and my meter easily set right on the manual-adjustment page. Which brings us to the 5200ES's graphic user interface, or GUI: These translucent onscreen displays are, by a wide margin, the most elegant and detailed I've seen from any receiver, and they should do a great job walking the less familiar through the admittedly complex task of setting up an A/V system. The little textual "help" messages along the bottom of many pages, and the full-color, hi-rez look (especially for the speaker and surround setup menus), are undeniably cool. ERGONOMICS In a very real sense, once you've learned to bring up the GUI and use the remote's cursor/Enter cluster, you've learned all you need. Virtually everything is accessible through the menus, and the response is quite crisp (though the Sony 1080p LCD I used to check out the 5200ES could take a few seconds to re-sync, depending on the receiver's video settings). One problem with this kind of menu-based control system, however, is that some functions you want readily accessible may be deep in the menus. For example, if you want to adjust center-channel level up a few dB on the fly for the current movie (something I call the Robert Altman maneuver), you will need to make, by my count, no fewer than 16 keypresses from the GUI's home menu just to reach the required page. This holds true for several other potentially oft-desired features, though Sony was wise enough to provide dedicated remote-control keys to most critical commands such as source input, surround modes and radio
tuning, plus a few extras via a "Shift" key including the picture-in-picture feature and the output resolution of the built-in scaler. The good news is that reaching any command in the GUI is always easy, via the same On Screen and cursor remote keys. Teach your fingers where to find those, and you'll never need to peer at the remote. Sony also designed the system so that the onscreen display "remembers" its place: You can just toggle it on and off to jump back to, say, the page for adjusting channel levels or whatever other screen you last used. The remote itself is reasonably well laid out and easy to use but with a good bit of hard-to-read small lettering. There's no illumination a bit surprising at this price but it does boast powerful glow-in-thedark primary keys. VIDEO PERFORMANCE The Sony STR-DA5200ES's scaler uses Faroudja DCDi (Directional Correlation Deinterlacing) technology that can reformat signals up to 1080p through the HDMI output and up to 1080i through the component-video output (signals from S-video and composite-video outputs remain at 480i only, of course). The Sony overlays its GUI displays on any of its outputs, so the onscreen image of whatever you're playing appears beneath the semitranslucent menus on every hookup woo hoo! Furthermore, the receiver up- or cross-converts any lesser-resolution signal coming in on any input to the HDMI or component output at the currently set resolution. Result? The holy grail of a single HDMI cable from receiver to TV, with you simply selecting sources via the receiver, always having access to the onscreen menus, and always getting the best possible picture, at least in theory. And the practice is pretty close, too. I used Sony's excellent, 1080p-capable KDL-40XBR2 LCD HDTV (reviewed November), and images looked quite uniformly excellent. One caveat: The current multi-scaler state of the A/V world makes this kind of evaluation tricky: My Comcast HD box, Panasonic upconverting DVD player, and everyday TV (a Samsung DLP), as well as the Sony XBR display used for this review, all can (and in the latter cases, always do) also scale video signals. Consequently, you can't always be sure which product's processing is doing what to the signal you're looking at. That said, I'm fairly comfortable that the 5200ES's Faroudja scaler gave excellent service in just about every mode. I could easily compare 480p coming from the DVD player going directly into a component-video input on the TV with the same signal scaled to 1080p (or other resolution) by the receiver and output as HDMI. No great surprise: Compared with the TV performing its own internal 1080p upconversion from its analog input, the receiver won hands down. For instance, in the shot opening Chapter 8 of The Island, the solidity and coherence of the falling-water feature were obviously better, more film-like. Making comparisons between the DVD player's own 1080i upconversion and the receiver's 1080p was far more difficult and thus inconclusive. But either way, I've rarely seen DVD video look better on my system. On many a Cessnapriced manufacturer's demo system, sure, but not here in my studio. The STR-DA5200ES made a much more obvious (and welcome) difference when I viewed standard-def cable. Setting its scaler to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p (or even 480p) yielded noticeably better pictures. Close inspection of the original signal revealed that, as I find with almost all scalers, unprocessed 480i actually included as much or more fine detail, but with much more visible line structure and video noise. The receiver-processed versions, on the other hand, showed snappier, bold edges and more vibrant color ranges, with just a slightly softer overall look. The lower the rez of the original source, the harder it got to judge the differences among receiver-scaled 720p/1080i/p: DVDs, for example, were clearly superior in the 1080 settings on this 1080p display, while upconverted standard-def television could be tough to call. The 5200ES's video processing extends another groundbreaking receiver feature: picture-in-picture. There are some limitations: There's no TV tuner built into the receiver (now there's a thought), and the feed for the PIP window is limited to standard-def signals coming in on either the composite- or S-video inputs. And there's no "swap" command to make the PIP image the main picture. Nevertheless, the potential usefulness is there. And should your TV or cable box or both have their own PIP processing, you could conceivably rig up PIP-IP, or even PIP-IP-IP. AUDIO PERFORMANCE Oh, yeah audio. Sony claims that the 5200ES's digital signal processing for audio represents a new generation of better-sounding hardware, and I have to admit that either I'm as suggestible as the next guy (perfectly possible) or it's true. Sound quality on movie soundtracks was excellent, as were stereo CDs processed via the Dolby Pro Logic IIx/Music mode. The Sony STR-DA5200ES

had ample power, playing plenty loud in my room for even fully cinema-like movie presentation via my medium-sensitivity speakers. Sony's proprietary Digital Cinema Sound surround modes are included in all their interesting variety and also sounded fine though, as usual, I preferred plain PLIIx or DTS for surround from most sources, as the least-colored options. The 5200ES's auto-setup routine permits results for three different listening positions or user preferences to be stored and recalled. The routine also incorporates automatic equalization, available in three versions: to match response to Sony's own listening-room ideal, to deliver "flat" response in your room, or to normalize your center and surrounds to your main fronts. All these proved interesting, and high in intrinsic quality, but their usefulness will depend on your speakers, room, and tastes. Sony endowed the STR-DA5200ES with a front-panel USB port into which you can jack most storage devices, including a thumb drive or other flash-memory cache. (The receiver decodes only MP3, WMA, and Sony's own MiniDisc ATRAC files.) If you had a spare 80-gig hard drive lying about (and these days, who doesn't?), you could load it up with music files and have a stripped-down music server for the $25 price of an external case: The 5200ES gives you onscreen display of basic metadata and full transport control, although no fancy playlist or sorting functions. Sony's "Portable" sound mode is a two-channel setting said to optimize compressed-audio files. This sounded to me like typical "aural-enhancer" processing; my music files sounded better to me in plain ol' stereo.
THE BOTTOM LINE The list of A/V receivers with HDMI-output scaling is short indeed, though certain to grow. The Sony STR-DA5200ES A/V receiver is, presently, unique on many fronts notably, its 1080p capability and its graphic interface and has the performance to back it up. At its modest-by-flagshipstandards price, the STR-DA5200ES legitimately earns close consideration by any serious A/V receiver shopper.