Sony STRDH190.CEK 2 Channel Amplifier with Phone Input and Bluetooth - Black

Product Information

One handy feature that the receiver has is the ability to turn on from a paired Bluetooth device, like your phone, even if the receiver is in standby mode. And the stereo receiver’s general heft is actually a strong selling point for me, too. I appreciate its sturdiness in a world so reliant on an ever-changing internet landscape. In 10 or 15 years, when Spotify has gone bankrupt or Apple faces a huge lawsuit that ends up deleting all your MP3s, I’ll still have my stereo receiver. Lowing our lofty standards good bit, the Sony STR-DH190 seems to be a good amplifier. It looks nice, has remote, multiple inputs, phono, etc. and produces a lot of power. It is certainly much better than a lot of Internet specials when it comes to amplifiers. What you pay for it gets you headphone amplifier and that is it. The value is therefore remarkable. When Dolby & DTS encoded sound streams are detected**, automatically upscales to drive all channels including height. The STR-DH190 brings together your vinyl and digital music. The perfect match for any turntable, you can switch effortlessly between analogue and digital with simple BLUETOOTH® connectivity and connect to all your equipment.

The phono amplifier and transformer are positioned optimally to minimise interference from the magnetic field. A reinforced frame and beam chassis design reduces transmitted vibration from speaker sound pressure for more focused, powerful sound. The receiver’s controls are very much streamlined, unlike some other options I’d found in my search. Here’s how you boot it up: Press the power button. Adjust the volume with the substantial-feeling knob labeled “volume.” Turn the input knob to match your input. And that’s it. True audiophiles might look for fine-tuning options. I just wanted something I could control without much thought. The stereo receiver has an incredibly clean output.Both STRZA5000ES & STRDH190 answer to same remote control commands; no easy way to separate other than leaving one receiver off. As for music, again the results were very strong so long as I remained within the capabilities of the receiver and used speakers suited to it. And switched the sound of stereo music to ‘Stereo’ or ‘Direct’ or to ‘Pure Direct’, rather than the silly ‘All Channel Stereo’ default. Also in ‘Sound Effect’ is a ‘Night Mode’, an ‘Equalizer’ (actually, bass and treble controls) for each channel pair, and ‘Calibration Type’ from which you can choose ‘Engineering’ (the default), ‘Front Ref’, ‘Full Flat’ or ‘Off’. This sets the reference which the auto EQ curves seek to approximate. ‘Front Ref’ is for those who like their front speaker sound relatively unprocessed and want the other speakers to conform, tonally, to them. ‘Engineering’ makes the sound match “the Sony listening room standard frequency characteristics”. (I got that from the online manual. The information you need is split between the printed one in the box and the online manual.) Finally, in ‘Sound Effect’ is a Pure Direct setting. When you start up the receiver it presents a kind of basic user menu across the screen of your TV. This can overlay whatever video signal is being throughput, even UHD HDR BT.2020 stuff, and it can be invoked at any time with the ‘Home’ key. The four options are ‘Watch’, which lets you choose one of the four HDMI inputs, ‘Listen’, which lets you choose from Bluetooth, the FM tuner (there is no AM tuner) and SA/CD analogue or digital, ‘Easy Setup’ which invokes a settings wizard, the inappropriately-named ‘Sound Effect’, and ‘Speaker Settings’ which allows manual adjustments to speaker settings.

You might also notice a “Pure Direct” button on the front of the device and the remote and wonder how it improves sound quality. Don’t get too excited—the only thing that it does is turn off the display lights “to suppress noise that affects sound quality”, and disable any EQ adjustments made to the bass and treble. This has been a feature on receivers for a long time now, and a hotly debated one. Zone 2 speaker outputs occupy the height channel connections; meaning driving 7.2.2 channels with powered Zone2 speaker output is NOT possible without a 2nd amp. Can you cheat and go with four-ohm speakers if you already have them? We would never recommend that you do, of course. But if you must, then just be cautious with levels.

Product highlights:

Physical media seems the obvious solution here. Buy CDs or vinyl. (Yes, their production contributes to climate change, but some say streaming media has the same — if not higher — carbon footprint than physical media.) Left it to cool overnight but this morning still does not power up. Nothing is smoked in there but there is a smell of burnt varnish which points the finger likely at the power transformer.

Despite its relatively low price point, the stereo receiver has an incredibly clean output. The speakers I’m using are basically bottom-of-the-barrel; the fact that this receiver can make them sound dynamic and lush verges on miraculous. There’s even a setting called “pure effect” that shuts down all necessary lights on the stereo to provide a clearer listening experience. As noted the STR-DH190 is a decent integrated amplifier that comes at a reasonable cost. Ignoring the low price, the STR-DH190 offers you quite a bit of versatility. This is a component that you can put into your garage or workshop or maybe you have kids that love music and you wanted to get them a nice stereo system component without breaking the bank? Connecting a device using Bluetooth was simple as well all you need to do is switch the unit to Bluetooth and follow the instructions that Sony has laid out in their manual and you are up and running in a few minutes. Who The Sony STR-DH190 Is Not Right for? Oh, and about that DVD player… home CD players, it seems, are somewhat more difficult to come by in 2022. DVD players can play CDs, though, and they’re pretty inexpensive. I went with this one to match the receiver.) Stereo receivers are very easy to come by as it turns out. So easy to come by that I had to sift through results to figure out which would connect to my old Panasonic speakers as well as to my middle-of-the-line record player. And I didn’t want the price to stop me from making rent. Subwoofer line output: This feature makes it much easier for you to add more bass by connecting a powered subwoofer to your system—an appealing idea, considering that some of these amps aren’t powerful enough to produce much deep bass. In most cases, this is a full-range output, which means your speakers still get the same amount of bass if you connect a subwoofer, and that can cause smaller speakers to distort the sound. However, a couple of amps we tested incorporate a crossover that can filter the bass out of the main speakers for lower distortion and smoother, more even bass response.

What's in the box:

AppleTV 4K can pass thru Dolby 5.1 with Atmos as E-AC3 (meaning, the receiver will recognize and display the sound stream as Atmos), however, it cannot pass thru Dolby TrueHD7.1 with Atmos or any form of DTS or DTS-X to the receiver. Anything higher than Dolby5.1 is passed to the receiver as LCPM lossless capped at 7.1 channels with no height channel or object-based sound encoding. Further, much of the networking stuff may be duplicated in your TV — especially given that Sony’s own models (such as our award-winning KD65-A1 OLED) favour the Android interface which is absolutely born to network. We didn’t have the A1 to hand, but for Netflix I used the Netflix app on an LG OLED TV and had it deliver the sound to the Sony receiver via the HDMI cable using the Audio Return Channel. This arrangement worked almost as seamlessly.