Best AVR for under $600 USD?
Looking to build a HT for myself in a 14 x 14 ft room. It will be mainly movies so I'm going to go with a 7.1 horn speaker set-up. I'm going to be somewhat on a budget but I want to get an AVR that will give me some good features. Support for the new HD audio formats is essential because I watch a lot of blu-ray and stream movies from my wired home network via my PS3. I also want to make sure HDMI 1.3 support is there, preferably with up-scaling to a high-def res. Since the horns will be very efficient, I feel I can get away with a receiver that doesn't necessarily have mountains of power, and consequently coast mountains of Benjamins. I'd like to keep it at or under $600 or so. Here is what I've considered:
Onkyo TX-SR606
Yamaha RX-V663
H/K AVR 254
Pioneer VSX-1018
Ideally I'd like a Denon AVR but they don't have the feature set these do at this price range.
If anyone can comment on how each or any of these sound compared to the others, or how they might match up with the horns. I have some reservations about the Onkyo after reading some comments about unwanted noise during bright images passed at 1080p.