STRAZ1000ES Premium ES 7.2 CH 8K A/V Receiver

Amazing build quality, easy to set up, feels very high end. Picture in Picture mode is great. Love the ease of use with it and being able to use my Sony Bravia 9 as a center channel speaker as well. App is easy to use, AVR powers on/off everything with one remote as well. The power cord is replaceable if you prefer to upgrade that as well. While it is more expensive to comparable brands, the overall build quality and ease of use, as well as the room correction are well worth the extra money to me.

So far I am happy with my purchase since it is an improvement from my previous Sony avr as it really packs a punch. The product seems to be solid and takes some getting use to with all the options it has with calibration. One thing to note when doing the auto calibration is that if you are using high channels and no rear surrounds to make sure to plug them in in the surround option port and not the high channel or the calibration will fail. I have since added my rears and had to reposition the speakers in the back of the avr and ran calibration again. After auto calibration make sure to set up your fronts as small or leave as large if no sub woofers. One thing to note is they will make good speakers sound better and the bad speakers sound bad because of how good the avr dac is. With the little time I have using it I can tell that it is about 10% louder the my previous Sony STRDH590 and a vast improvement when it comes to how good the voices come through on all movies. Hope this helps anyone looking to purchase this unit.

Update 2: This product is a nightmare. Loses configuration settings frequently. Totally incompatible with my Sony Bravia 8 TV and Verizon Fios Settop box eARC connection. Avoid this product! Update1: To be specific here, the listing for this receiver states that the Sony Music Center app supports this system. It does not. Sony support confirms it does not. The only way to control the unit’s features is in the room with the unit with its cheap remote. Update: The lack of a supported app for remote operation is a deal killer. This is a multi room multi zone system, but since you can’t control it from zones outside the room with the crummy provided remote, you have to go into the room and turn on the zone you want to operate and turn off the main zone if you need to. My 10 year old Pioneer elite system had a wonderful full featured remote and an equivalent iPhone app so you could control the system from any room in the house. This Sony sucks in this regard. Reducing my rating to one star. Forget Sony TV compatibility and get a different multi zone receiver and a different TV for that matter. You’ll be happier. Original 3 star review: Wanted to upgrade the receive to go with our new Bravia 8 TV. This would replace a 2013 Pioneer Elite SC-72 that was a great mid level receiver but becoming dated on recent 4K video and recent audio standards. The Sony STR-AN1000ES has noticeably poorer sound output over our 8 ohm Polk Audio surround speakers. Control of the audio functions are much, much less feature rich than the 12 year old Pioneer system were in spite of the significantly higher price tag for this lower power Sony unit. The sound is decent and the 360 degree sound field feature helps, but it falls short overall. I would be regretting the decision entirely to switch from Pioneer Elite to Sony except that the compatibility among Sony products adds convenience in day to day operations of the system. Turn on the TV and the receiver comes on. Keeps the complexity of operation simple for the rest of the family. Would I recommend it? If you don’t already have a surround system, just get a sound bar and sub woofer for equivalent sound and convenience. If you already have the speakers, can’t really recommend this for the price. Pros: Compatible with a Sony Bravia 8 TV for seamless operation in your home theatre. (Gets it the 3rd star in this review.) Cons: Terrible remote Doesn’t work with Sony Music Center app as advertised. (System not found. Other Sony systems on the same network are there.) Decent sound, but disappointing at this price point. “Easy setup” was crazy hard to get going and took a couple of hours fiddling with it to get the menu to show up on the Sony Bravia 8 TV which is required for set up. No windows configuration software for a pc like other systems. Sounds under powered at low to mid volumes. Control feature poor for a system at this price.

Bought a Pioneer receiver but couldn’t get it to pair with my new Samsung OLED. Bought the Sony AN1000 and it worked great but felt I needed more power. I bought the Sony AZ1000 and couldn’t be happier. Spent some serious time with Sony and Samsung help lines and got it all hooked up and running. I had everything connected correctly but was having a problem with the TV Recognizing the receiver. Would not have been able to figure this out without both manufactures support. Both Sony and Samsung were really great. The sound is better on this ES model. If you can spare the extra dollars I would recommend getting the AZ1000. Sony receivers are easy to use once you get everything set up. Sony has a rich sound, better I think, than some of the other Asian brands. Like the 4k and 8k upsampling. Picture is great. I will be set now for many years to come.

Actually it should be 3.5 stars. The product itself is good for what I wanted to do. Replace two outdated high end receivers that don't have HDMI outputs. The reason for the rating is the fact that SONY has to make it easier to connect to it's compatible equipment. In this case paring the STRAZ 1000 ES receiver with the Sony A95L Television. I could not get the television/Receiver combo to output the in room speakers when in television mode. It recognized the 5 speakers and 2 subs in FM Mode but not in TV mode. I worked on it for 2 hours then stopped. I had a friend come over who installs equipment like this for a living and it took him 4 hours. It ended up being to many menus and the Auto Sync not really being Auto. He had to go in and manually make selections in the receiver menu and TV Menu to finally get them to talk. And Amazon..You have to do better in the packing department. Receiver Box in a Bigger Box with no packing.