Receivers are actually funny things.  It’s hard to gauge their performance individually, because they really serve more as connectors and conduits than anything else.  An excellent receiver will do little good when paired with shoddy speakers, after all.

Basically, you have to use different measures when determining the quality of a receiver, and by these measures, I can tell you that the Yamaha RX-V1065BL is a pretty solid unit.

The Yamaha RX-V1065BL is a 7.2 surround sound receiver with lip-sync, DTS-HD, dolby trueHD, auto EQ, auto speaker setup, and the ability to upconvert analog television into 1080p.

That last part surprised me to no end, frankly.  Converting analog to 1080p digital?  Amazing!  That’s almost like lead into gold as far as home theater goes, at least as far as I’m concerned.  This sucker will do just about everything short of making you popcorn, and that’s probably the next version.  And it had better provide lots of useful features, too, as this monster weighs in at right around nine hundred dollars.

So if you’re willing to shell out a thousand bucks on one component of your home theater system, then you could do a whole lot worse than the Yamaha RX-V1065BL.