Digital Trends

If you’ve been waiting for the prices of HDMI-equipped A/V receivers to come down to earth, Sherwood’s new RD-7503 should help you pull the trigger. While it doesn’t have every bell and whistle, it does boast a long list of features and can be expanded to include more. And with an online price less than $400, it costs only a little more than a good Blu-ray disc player.

But if you’re planning to connect this receiver to a home theater PC, be aware that we encountered some compatibility issues in our testing. We connected the HDMI outputs from two computers (a home-theater PC with integrated AMD Radeon HD 3200 graphics and an HP Pavilion HDX 9000 notebook with an AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT videocard), and neither machine would send video to the receiver at any resolution other than 640x480 (480p).

We then connected a third machine equipped with a videocard based on Nvidia’s GeForce 9800 GT card and a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, and the system worked as expected—sending video at 1080p to the receiver and on to the display. We achieved the same positive results when we plugged in our stand-alone Blu-ray disc player into the receiver, and then an ordinary DVD player with HDMI output (and the capacity to scale standard-definition video to 1080p).

At this point, AMD believes the problem is related to the computer's video processor not reading the receiver's EDID profile correctly, but the person we fact-checked this story with told us they have not encountered this problem with any of the other A/V receivers they've tested. A Sherwood representative initially told us that they had encountered a similar problem with a Motorola DCH3200 digital cable set-top box, but then did not respond to our follow-up questions by our deadline.