With most specialty audio-video company's suffering delays getting HDMI-packed AV preamps and receivers to market, Anthem has their highly anticipated Director D2v AV Preamp ready for consumers today.

Known by installer and consumers alike as a leader in the troubleshooting and integration of HDMI, Anthem knows better than most how to utilize these connections to their fullest. The Statement D2v is equipped with four additional HDMI 1.3c inputs (for a total of eight) and one additional HDMI 1.3c output (for a total of two), delivering unprecedented connection capabilities for a preamplifier/processor. All inputs and outputs offer Deep-Color support (36-bit) and high-definition audio streaming.

More connections are useful, of course, but performance is king. The Anthem Statement D2v delivers outstanding video enhancement courtesy of its updated VXP® digital image processor. This "latest-generation" processor offers professional-grade, fully-adaptive deinterlacing. Also included are adaptive 3D noise reduction, mosquito noise reduction, block artifact reduction, adaptive detail enhancement featuring sharpness and texture enhancement with overshoot control, and adaptive contrast enhancement. The D2v's powerful, multi-layered graphics engine allows for sophisticated on-screen display generation that is ideal for setup menus.

Audio performance on the Statement D2v has been ramped up to meet the demands of emerging HD audio standards. Two dual-core digital signal processor (DSP) engines offer 800 MIPS (million instructions per second) of processing power to allow 7.1-channel decoding of Dolby® Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD£ High-Resolution Audio and DTS-HD£ Master Audio. The Anthem Statement D2v also supports 24/192 PCM audio input, up to 7.1 channels.

Anthem's Room Correction System (ARC) is a standard feature on all Statement D2v preamplifier/processors. While equalizing frequency response in a room to achieve some generic (i.e., "flat") response is a common approach, it sounds unnatural because it assumes the listening room is anechoic and does not account for how a speaker sounds in a room. Anthem's true audiophile approach with ARC instead uses proprietary processing to compute each speaker's in-room frequency response and then computes a target frequency response for each to yield the optimal sound.

Estimated price for the Anthem Statement D2v is $7,499.