The Onkyo ED-301 Dolby-Digital-Decoder I purchased in April ´99 confused me a little during installation, because the owners manual was simply wrong in the secetion of adjusting the speaker distances. After solving this problem, I enjoyed the excellent sound quality of this decoder-only unit. But the pleasure wasn´t for too long: The outputs were blocked after switching on the unit for some reason. Sometimes this happend, sometimes not. The service was not able to find the failure and sent me a new ED-301!
This decoder worked fine up to mid of this month. Then the right main output failed with a DC-voltage of +1.4V!
But meanwhile I had some breathtaking sound events, especially using the digital Dolby mode with the PCM stream coming from a Sony DVD player. The ED-301 has a superior dynamic with brilliant channel separation and very neutral sound behavior. This was the first time, my Dynaudio speakers produced a bass foundation which was even below the floor! From the sound point of view this decoder unit is highly recommended for those listeners who have seperate power amplifiers for all channels.

The ED-301 is not remote controllable and got a real mains switch. In the video section it provides SVHS-Connector as well as RCA connectors for composite video signals.
There are two inputs selctable with both digital audio inputs (coaxial and fibre optic) and analogue inputs. A big
disatvantage is that the (audio)level setting is not separately adjustable for input 1 and input 2!
I can highly recommend to use the digital inputs to have lower noise at the output than using the analogue inputs
for Dolby-Prologic applications coming from a (S)VHS-recorder.

Conclusion:
The Onkyo ED-301 is a very good sounding Dolby Digital decoder with a complete outfit, but my two units had some
annoying flaws which must not by typical for the quality for Onkyo products!