In a career spanning four decades, Sunfire's founder and chief designer Bob Carver has morphed from bushy to bald, young Turk to elder (or at least older) statesman, and iconoclast to anointed icon. Throughout, one thing neither he nor his designs has ever been is dull, and Sunfire's latest "Theater Grand" A/V receiver is no exception.
The Sunfire Theater Grand Receiver 3 is short on bleeding-edge features: no video upconversion to HDMI; no auto-calibration routine; no high-def menu system. (It does boast a unique stereo-enhancement circuit, however, more on which anon.) But what this obviously well-built, surprisingly compact receiver does have, like many classic Bob Carver designs, is power, and lots of it. Despite its modest size (a benefit of Carver's "Tracking Downconverter Amplifier" topology), the TGR-3 specs 200 watts from each of seven channels. And while Sunfire does not explicitly claim that with all driven simultaneously, the Grand's performance on this demanding test set a new benchmark for receivers in my lab.
SETUP Straightforward rear-panel layout and fixed input assignments made setup unusually quick and easy. The three HDMI inputs feed the DVD, SAT, and VID1 source postions, as do the three component-video inputs. Each of these positions also has a coax/optical digital audio path permanently assigned to it (the Sunfire doesn't extract any digital audio from HDMI, so you need at least two cables from an HDMI source). There's a fourth digital audio path permanently assigned to the CD input. The downside here is that three digital-audio-equipped video source inputs are not a lot: Hook up, say, a digital-cable box, an upconverting or high-def DVD source, and a terrestrial DTV tuner, and you're out of slots. No front-panel convenience inputs for a game console or camcorder, either.
Menus are simple, intuitive, and purely text-based — compared to the latest powerfully graphic on-screen GUIs from across the Pacific, they look a bit crude, but they do the job. Unfortunately, the TGR-3 doesn't display any graphics over its HDMI monitor output, so if you've got an HDMI-capable TV, you'll be running a second cable and switching inputs.
Along with the usual 7.1 channels, the TGR-3 has line-level outputs for left and right "side-axis" speakers. These channels deliver "spread" from the main left/right channels to make surround and multichannel playback wrap more continuously around the listening position; you have the option of powering them by reassigning the back-surround amplifier channels, but they require an outboard stereo amp for a full 9.1-channel layout. I messed with these enough to judge them potentially useful but disconnected them for critical listening.
Sunfire's remote is a familiar OEM design we've seen accompanying a number of receivers and pre-pros over the years, and it's a good one. Clear labeling, adequate backlighting, and extensive programmability make it a true system-wide asset, though it requires a short learning period till you get used to first selecting the component to be controlled, then the page where the desired command resides.
You select listening modes via the remote by first choosing STEREO or DOLBY, then cycling through the available variants via the arrow keys; DTS options are included in the DOLBY submenu. Unfortunately, you can assign only one Dolby Pro Logic II or DPL IIx mode to each input as the default. Consequently, switching from, say, DPL IIx-Movies to DPL IIx-Music — something I do frequently, since I use the same player for movie and music discs — requires a trip back to the menus each time.
On the other hand, the menus do enable you to set and store different subwoofer levels for Dolby/DTS listening modes and for stereo, which I think is thoughtful and useful. Better still, the remote has always-available "on-the-fly" trims for center, surround, and sub outputs on one of its "soft" pages, and you can set things up so that these are remembered or, if you prefer, re-zeroed every time the TGR-3 power cycles. Somebody in Snohomish, Washington has actually taken the time to think about how real people use these things.
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The Short Form |
| Price $4,999 / sunfire.com / 425-335-4748 |
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Snapshot
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Superb audio quality and massive power counterbalance sparse hookup facilities and video processing. |
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Plus
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| •Awesome power •Flexible, usable system remote •Superb sound quality |
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Minus
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| •No video scaling or transfer to HDMI output •No digital audio via HDMI •Only three digital-audio capable video inputs •Awkward surround-mode selection |
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Key Features
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| •200 watts x 7 channels •3 HDMI inputs •Transcodes composite-/S-video to component (480i) •Surround back channels assignable to Zone 2 or side-axis speakers •AM/FM tuner with 40 presets |
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Test Bench
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| I encountered no glitches or surprises while testing the Sunfire Theater Grand Receiver 3. Power output was consistently among the highest I have measured from a multichannel receiver, and its 165 watts (22.2 dBW) with five channels driven represents a clear benchmark for the category, measuring 2 to 3 dB greater than from many other manufacturers' flagship receivers. Noise was generally very low — no more than a dB shy of theoretical ideals for digital audio. Noise on the multichannel analog inputs was a few dB greater than in the best receivers we've seen, possibly a consequence of byproducts from the Sunfire's unconventional amplifier, but this was of no audible consequence. Full Lab Results |
For example, on the DVD-Audio release of Donald Fagen's 1993 album Kamakiriad the Sunfire effortlessly offered more level than I could use (well, almost ... ), even given the moderate sensitivity of my speaker array. At extreme volume, Fagen's Long Island-nebbish voice remained faultlessly clean and defined, no matter how hard sidekick Walter Becker's bass danced on "Snowbound."
Same deal with movies. Ridley Scott's White Squall DVD is a variegated test for a surround system. The Sunfire delivered its broad range of effects, music, and dialogue with great power and transparency at serious-cinema levels with absolutely no problem — providing enough clarity to make audible some inconsistencies in timbre and spatiality in the crashing-wave effects that occur at different points in the 1996 film.
For the surround course, the TGR-3 confines itself to Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS and DTS Neo:6, and a single, fairly clangorous mode labeled "Jazz Club." No problem, in my opinion, since the Dolby and DTS palettes cover pretty much every eventuality for serious listening, though some users might miss the ability to pull multichannel pulse-code modulation (PCM) from the HDMI inputs. This feature would allow you to play uncompressed PCM soundtracks from HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc players without the resorting to a multichannel analog connection.
There's also the latest generation of Bob Carver's venerable Sonic Hologram processing, which seeks to compensate for the unnatural characteristics of listening to sound from a pair of stereo speakers, as opposed to your ears hearing spatially as they would in nature. This works remarkably well for a single, well-situated listener, opening and spreading the image, deepening "space," and even adding an illusion of height — but it may seem a bit old-hat in today's DSP-driven era.
VIDEO PERFORMANCE By current high-end standards, the Sunfire's video routing and processing are basic. Composite- or S-video sources get transcoded to the component outputs at their native resolution (480i) with no upscaling, and that's about it. While the setup menus appear on the component out, the defeatable "pop-ups" that display volume and surround-mode can be seen only through the composite- and S-video outputs.
The three HDMI inputs get switched but not scaled or processed in any way. HDMI from my Panasonic DVD player passed fine at all its resolutions, including upscaled 1080i. Video quality on 1080i or 720p signals via HDMI looked fine, and component signals also passed through the Sunfire unscathed. Transcoded S-video did look barely softer, but if you're still watching a composite-/S-video source, do you really deserve better?
THE BOTTOM LINE It's true that $5,000 is a lot of coin for an A/V receiver, and next to models half its cost, the Sunfire Theater Grand Receiver 3 looks Spartan. But this receiver is all about audio performance — quantity as well as quality. If you don't demand extensive surround modes, or more than three fully equipped A/V inputs (all most of us will ever need), this Sunfire receiver is a world-beater.
Full Lab Results
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