General questions about receiver technology progress for audio purposes

[nitsuj3580]

I currently have a very basic system that's about 5-6 years old. It consists of 2 Polk R30 speakers and a Pioneer VSX-1014TX receiver that was considered the best bang for the buck for awhile.

I'm looking to upgrade my speakers to a full 5.1 surround system and currently researching speaker options. I see that newer receivers have more inputs, HDMI support, etc but I only really have an HTPC that I use with a HomerunPrime for TV watching and all my movie watching needs and an Xbox 360 at the moment so I just use 2 of the 3 HDMI inputs on my Samsung DLP. I'm fine with that.

My main question is should I worry about upgrading my receiver from an audio perspective? Are there advances in receiver technology that would really improve my audio experience for both music and surround sound for movie listening? Or should my current receiver be fine to drive most nice speakers out there as well as support any audio formats I would need these days?

Thanks!

 

[fralexandr]

for the most part no, technology doesn't change that fast in the audio department

the only reason to move to a new receiver would be if you wanted any of the new options like hdmi 1.4 or 3d support and such

if you don't like the heat output of the older class a/b amps you could try moving to a class d amp (most newer pioneer receivers use class d amplifiers now i think). In theory they have worse sound quality, but it's hard to tell in actuality

 

[lamedude]

Room correction via AudysseyEQ or something similiar is the only feature you're missing out that comes to mind. I doubt you'll care about ProLogic IIZ. If you want lossless audio from BD you'll need use analog inputs and a player that can decode TrueHD/DTS-HD.