Sound, looks, remote, connectivity & simpicity.

Some limitations in its flexibility. no balanced inputs.

During this time of an ever changing technilogical world with the relavent today obsolete tommorow, gimmicky, gizmo oriented society, its nice to find products that we can hang onto for a while and enjoy. Processors; like computers tend to fall into this category because no matter how high quality they are, they're only as good as the technology around to support it. The sunfire TGIII appealed to me because it seems to focus on sound first, simplicity second and then features. I find it asthetically appealing with its orange & blue lights, tapered corners and a warmth that seems to match its sound, a definite touch of class. The back panel is laid out beautifully with plenty of inputs & outputs for almost any configuration. More emphasis is put on the unit itself rather than the operating system (More of a fine piece of audio equipment rather than a computer.)

Now to the sound. After discovering how easy it is to setup (i didnt even have the remote at first) The sound just blew me away . I was upgrading from a b&k reference 20 wich was no slouch, but the sunfire just opened up the soundstage & created an atmosphere similar to going to the theater. It sounds more upfront with movies, clearer dialogue and more surround info, overall very warm sounding. It seemed to add the wow factor or whatever was missing before. Its great as a surround processor or as a 2 channel preamp. Its easy to use with good flexibility, but not as flexible as other processors i've usd. But, in some ways thats a good thing since too many features just gets complicated with no real improvement in sound anyway. The excellent remote does allow you to easily adjust things on the fly since your preferences might change from DVD to CD or from one disc to another. For instance, if you put a stereo cd in a dvd player it wont autimatically select stereo you have to change it yourself since it will only play the mode you preselected or the last mode used for that input. Only DD and DTS encoded material are automatically selected no matter what it is preset for. I also wish you could select speakers to small and still use the source direct for stereo mode, but if you change speaker size it affects all inputs except the 8 channel one.

Overall a sonic winner in HT or stereo only at a good price on the used market compared to other units if you consider what's important, the sound.