Anthem is flourishing under the umbrella of Paradigm. After the critical success of the AVM20 processor and its associated amplifiers, Anthem decided to go upmarket as it expanded its line.

Typical of Anthem and Paradigm's latest endeavors, they have made a very strong effort to deliver high feature content and audio performance for relatively little money. The Statement D1 processor is not cheap at $5000, but read on to understand why it may be worth every nickel, and perhaps more.

Additional Resources
• Read more Anthem reviews on this resource page
• Read other high end AV preamp reviews from Anthem, Arcam, Sunfire, Meridian, Krell, Mark Levinson and many others here.

Unique Features
The Statement D1 is a truly handsome piece. Although sharing some obvious family DNA with the AVM20, it is bigger, more substantial looking, and with a casing that looks well finished and of high quality. The green display of the AVM20 has been replaced by a very nice, large, bluish-white vacuum tube display, and the green lights have been replaced by the much more chic blue ones. The front panel is covered with even more buttons, but they are well labeled, fairly logically arranged and their silver finish is relatively attractive. The back panel is very well laid out, with four (that's right, four!) component video inputs, S-Video and composite inputs for every source, balanced outputs, and a pair of balanced audio inputs. There are the prerequisite 7.1 inputs for a SACD/DVD-A player, and HDMI switching is promised for the future. As with the AVM20, the processor is fully hardware and software upgradeable, with one of the first software upgrades for Pro Logic IIx, which allows for 7.1 processing from two channels. Makes you wonder how many channels Dolby can keep extracting from plain old stereo...

Read much, much more on Page 2