I use an arcam avr 350 for home theater applications and am very satisfied with its performance. I use analogue interconnects and a blue ray player with internal decoding of hd sound formats to access these high res soundtracks, and do so with great success. I would highly recommend looking for a used avr 350 which you could probably buy for a song since it is now a discontinued model. It also provides satisfying stereo playback and I happily relied on it for that when my red wine amp was away being upgraded. Finally, while the avr 350 has HDMI video switching, I do not consider it to be an essential feature. I never use it. For the most part it just requires another HDMI cable to hook up. However, HDMI 1.3a compatibility I do consider to be a worthwhile feature. It allows for a really clean hook up and the processing of high res audio formats, which are just awesome. The arcam avr 350 does not have this option so keep that in mind if you decide this matters to you and you choose to investigate the arcam, which I highly recomend you do.
