Sony STR-DE445

 

While not as stylish as some of Sony's more affluent AV receivers, the STR-DE445 has a certain charm. The short and dumpy box may be full of fresh air but the finish is impeccable and from the front it manages to look several times its humble asking price. The pale blue display is complemented by buttons illuminated in orange and a vivid blue central bar shines out to indicate when the amp is decoding five-channel surround sound.

 

Around the back things are not so impressive. There is only an average spread of inputs suitable for a basic home cinema system and the speaker terminals are all spring clips - and particularly grim ones at that. They are small and don't lock in place so there is no point in investing in speaker cables as thick as mooring ropes unless you want to pare down all the bare ends.

 

Simplicity itself

On the plus side, the set-up interface is very much a stripped-down version of the more complex procedures found on Sony's upmarket models. Follow the logical steps and it will tune itself to suit your room and speakers before you start. However, some features, such as virtual speaker settings, will have you wading through the manual.

Feature-wise the Sony offers a healthy spread of power to all channels, a rather nice built-in tuner with full RDS facilities and a wide frequency response in anticipation that you might fancy buying an SACD or DVD-Audio player to go with it. Functional frills are few and far between but all the bases are covered with Dolby Digital and dts decoding, automatic format switching and a slimline, if rudimentary, remote control handset.

 

With Dolby Digital soundtracks, it cracks on with pace and enthusiasm, almost to excess. The bass is full-bodied and weighty and there is a frightening clarity and detail in the treble that can turn sharper than a bag of lemons if you push the volume too far. Without some tweakery of the centre channel level, this emphasis of frequency extremes can leave the bit in the middle - dialogue on male voices, for example - left skulking somewhere behind the TV.

 

Musical youth

With multi-channel music, such as the dts version of the Eagles' When Hell Freezes Over, the Sony has great timing and rhythm, and can really get the head bobbing and foot tapping. Individual notes have their own distinct place in the mix and there is plenty of mileage in the volume control if you have a hankering to go large. In two-channel stereo the sound is open and spacey with bass somewhere between prodigious and gratuitous depending on the music.

 

At £230, the STR-DE445 is a damn fine value-for-money AV receiver but its enthusiasm can begin to grind you down after a while. It's all just a bit too much of a good thing.

 

XTRA INFO

The STR-DE445 uses Digital Signal Processing (DSP) trickery to create several sets of 'virtual' surround sound speakers, from just the pair you have bolted to the back wall. This feature quite successfully creates a flood of sound for rear effects rather than a point source and thus better emulates the sound of a real cinema. If you are really stuck for space, Sony's virtual DSP modes can create sounds that appear behind your sofa from just the front main speakers. However, like anything virtual - it just ain't as good as the real thing.