I just upgraded my AV receiver to a Sony STRDH820

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Brilliant receiver for a very affordable price. Like you I wanted to get rid of a lot of cable clutter. However I was researching receivers and discovered these Sony ones contain a very good Faroudia DCDi EDGE upscaler that upscales all low res inputs and outputs them via HDMI in 1080p. This is a great solution for me as I can feed all my old consoles through this and all connect to the TV through a single HDMI cable.

It also has a fairly simple onscreen menu system for changing settings. You can also rename the receivers inputs displayed on the receive itself, so very handy to rename to things like PS3.

It has a lot of inputs too. 2 optical in and one out (I do wish it had more of these but I do have a solution) 7 RCA audio and composite, 2 component (again I wish there were a couple more but have a solution), and 4 HDMI inputs. Sadly no S-Video which would have been useful for my N64 as that is PAL N64's best output method, but I have an S-Video to VGA converter that works well for that.

This receive also supports all the latest audio formats, and also supports 7.2

It even has an iPod dock on the front which once connected you can then navigate and place audio/video from directly on the TV screen. Nice little additional feature.

Before this I had a fairly old Sony STR DB930 which was over 10 years old. It still supports all 5.1 formats and was still going strong, but lacked HDMI support, as well as component or upscaling.

Sony also sell a higher up model, called the DN2010 I think. That adds a few more features, but not enough for me to spend the extra.

Now, for the solution to limited optical and component inputs... I managed to get a Joytech control center 245c from ebay, brand new for 99p!

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This is basically just a device switch. It has 7 source inputs, each with component, S-Video, Composite, RCA audio and optical, and then one output mirroring these. It is only a passthrough switch and not a converter, so if you connect something via say composite, it only outputs it from the composite out. It also has an ethernet hub built in for connecting consoles all directly through this one device.

So I'm using this with the Sony receiver, so I have the composite, optical and composites all connected from the 245c to the receiver, and I just need to switch sources on the 245c and the Sony receiver upscales them all and outputs them to HDMI 1080p.

For me this is a very nice solution.

The only thing I'm completely missing from this whole setup is SCART RGB. For that I currently don't have a solution, although I've been considering the XRGB3 for some time, but the newer XRGB-mini is about to get an English firmware release, and will be even better as that has HDMI out too, plus with its scanline generator will be great for retro systems.