The SC-HT700 handles the audio end of a home theater, giving you surround sound decoding, amplification, and playback through a specially matched six-speaker system (left, center, right, left and right surround, and low-frequency subwoofer). The five-disc carousel system's DVD-Audio playback makes it adept at music as well as movies, offering super high-fidelity (192 kHz/24-bit) sound. DVD-Audio discs provide multichannel and stereo sound, incredible storage capacity, and unique bonus materials not available on regular audio CDs.

DVD movies will look and sound great through the system's 54 MHz/10-bit video decoder, video depth enhancer, progressive-scan video output (for use with high-definition and HD-ready televisions), and Dolby Digital and DTS discrete 5.1-channel surround decoding and rendering. Progressive scanning, referred to as 480p for the number of horizontal lines that compose the video image, creates a picture using twice the scan lines of a conventional DVD picture, providing higher resolution and sharper images while eliminating nearly all motion artifacts.

The speaker set includes four satellite speakers (front and rear left and right) powered by 45 watts each, a 90-watt center-channel speaker (critical for handling most of a movie's dialogue), and a powerful, 170-watt subwoofer specially designed for unobtrusive placement. All speakers are magnetically shielded to protect your TV from distortion induced by the speakers' magnetic fields. In addition, a digital-synthesized FM/AM tuner lets you listen to your favorite radio stations.