I recently bought a Harman Kardon AVR-335 receiver from Harman direct ($350 US refurbished via eBay).
I had an older JVC receiver, which was a good receiver, but I wanted to bi-amp my speakers and when I tried, I found out my old system didn't have a preamp out. I used the tape out, but then I had no master gain. That just wasn't going to work with that gear.

I didn't really know where to look, what to buy, so being a JBL buff, and remembering that Oznob bought a recent HK receiver a while back and liked it, I went to the HarmanKardon website and started to read - to see what was out there.

I didn't need a lot of power for the smaller surround speakers I run (L20T in the rear, JBL EC25 (beech) for center in the front), and I knew I'd be using external amps for the front channels (biAmped 4343 clone monitors) and the Sub, so I didn't need to buy anything with huge amounts of watts per channel like the AVR 7300, nice as it is ...

The AVR series sound like REALLY nice units, but until I knew the HK receivers would do what I wanted to do, I got a cheaper model pretty much to try it out. I figured the AVR 335 was just about perfect for me - it has 7 channels at 55w/ch - but I just use it in 5.1 channel mode. (I use the Sub bass out to feeds an external amp/ speaker).

It has discrete, coaxial, S-VHS, and optical audio inputs - which works great for DVD, the SA cable box (HDTV) and the optical out from the Apple Airport Express for my iTunes feed from the computer (wireless). Its got (video) RGB ins for the DVD, HDTV (cable box) - and has more jacks than I need! And it switches HD sources in HD mode (by remote control even!) - very nice!

Of course, as I said, it has no RIAA turntable/phono in - but nothing in that kind of pricerange does. I got an external turntable preamp and just fed that into one of the audio ins and set that input to "stereo" so it wouldn't try to pull surround info from my records.

Now - the whole point of this change was to have discrete outputs, so I could biAmp my front L and R speakers for all sources.

Well - each channel has a preamp out jack on the rear - all controlled by the master volume (and by a remote control - very decadent!).

So - I feed left front and right front to my JBL 552 active crossover, then it feeds "low" out to the Citation 22 (220w/ch) for the front woofers, and "high" out to a Crown d-75 that feeds a passive crossover for the midBass, LE-85s and the 2405s.

its smart and remembers settings, so I can set the mode for each input (Stereo, DTS, etc) and when you select that source it plays that way. When I set it to play Cds, or Airtunes from my Mac, or records (I needed a preamp for records), I clicked a button on the remote to force it to "stereo", and after that it remembers to play CDs etc on just the front two channels. When I load a DVD, or HDTV, it plays that in 5.1 mode - and decodes two modes or Dolby, or DTS as needed.

Works very well for sound, plus, I can mute everything quickly when the phone rings!

I already had a Harman Kardon FL 8380 5 disc CD Changer that I got a while back, because I have a number of King Crimson and Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry remastered CDs that are marked HDCD, and the HK changer was one of the few units that did HDCD in a reasonable price range. It works well - I feed it into the Analog input for CD - if I want to do anything fancy I can always play CDs in my DVD player and use the optical audio in ...

So far - I love it! Its got that blue LED thing thats common now, but I can dim the display. It has a monitor feed I connected to the TV so I use on screen display when I set crossover points for the sub or - well, it has all kinds of configuration possibilities I'm never going to use ...

It even comes with a microphone you can plug in, set in the middle of the room, and let it "auto EQ" your system to match the room and speaker characteristics - but with the biamp and 4 way vintage speakers ... well I suspect all of that is more than it can deal with properly so I only tried it once and set it all myself. But I suspect it would work better with more current JBL surround speakers.

I highly recommend it - very flexible - great gear at a great price point!