Daniel Kumin

AudioControl is that rara avis, an American company that actually manufactures A/V electronics - carrying comparatively rational price tags - in the U.S. of A.

At some future date, someone, somewhere, will come up with a bigger, heavier, more powerful, and more fully featured A/V receiver than the one reviewed here. But until then we'll just have to make do with Denon's AVR-5800 - all 62 pounds, 1,190 watts, and seven THX Ultra-certified channels of it.

When this magazine's predecessor, Stereo Review, evaluated Energy's Take 5 system some four years ago, micro-size home theater speaker systems weren't too common.

Almost 20 years ago matrix-encoded Dolby Surround videotapes and laserdiscs brought surround sound to home theaters. Almost 15 years ago Dolby Pro Logic decoding raised the ante by extracting a center-channel signal from Dolby Surround recordings. And more than half a decade has passed since Dolby Digital brought discrete digital 5.1-channel surround sound home.