Sherwood delivers R-972 receiver with Trinnov Optimizer room EQ

All right, traditionalists -- if Sherwood's NetBoxx AVR with all its internet streaming is too radical for you, the R-972 and R-774 might strike a chord with your "the receiver must have a volume knob" sensibilities. The 7x100-Watt R-972 has been awaited mostly for its 3D Trinnov Optimizer room equalization, which has made some pretty big promises -- we'll have to see how it fares when paired up with Silicon Optix REON video processing, three zone support, and compliment of 4xHDMI inputs, which seems like a negative in the current crop of $1,500 AVRs. Rather than just scale things down for the $850 R-774 model, Sherwood keeps the power at 7x100-Watts, but touts Anchor Bay video processing, two zone support, and optional pairing with the BT-R7 Bluetooth receiver so you can send tunes wirelessly to your receiver.

[jhoff80 Posted Sep 10th 2009 5:51PM]

This thing still hasn't been released yet? Wasn't it announced two years ago now?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 10th 2009 5:55PM]

Yeah whatever, I'll believe it when people actually have it. This thing has seen so many delays its not even funny anymore. I've been waiting for this thing to ship in quantity because it is what is holding up outlaw from releasing their new processor.

[jhoff80 Posted Sep 10th 2009 8:49PM]

Yeah, I had been waiting too. I previously had a Outlaw 950, and prefer receivers only because I like keeping the mess of wiring to a minimum, but when I heard Outlaw would be using the processor part of this design to make a pre/pro, I was immediately interested in it. About a year ago, gave up waiting, got the AVR1909 which despite it's price has some decent sound quality and has Audessey EQ instead of Trinnov, and honestly was happy to get rid of my extremely buggy 950.

Trinnov may or may not be better than Audessey, but it's taken them way too long.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 10th 2009 10:10PM]

It is almost like waiting for the Emotive UMC-1 or what I fear will be worse, and the one I want, the XMC-1.

Oh well, my Yamaha RX-V665 will do the trick for now.