2022 Audioholics Product of the Year Award Winners!

2022 has been a year of returning to "normal" for the most part. We've come a long way on the pandemic and supply chain problems that helped make ‘22 a great year to escape into music and movies in home systems we enjoyed with family and friends. As the industry bounces back from previous year's shortages, we reviewed some new innovations in products that may have otherwise been more evenly distributed over the last three years. Meanwhile in personal audio, headphones have smashed the wireless ceiling and seized a new category of high-end sound quality. Loudspeaker companies continued to push the boundaries of excellent performance per dollar ratio and receiver manufacturers have brought their A-game with innovative room correction systems and the latest in audio and video processing to ensure ALL of your UHD Video and Immersive Audio needs are satisfied.

To say we had a tough time deciding on this year’s Product of the Year Award winners is no exaggeration. We have lengthy Audioholics email threads that were so impassioned they may have set fire to some of our email apps. But we finally have the results, the official winners of Audioholics Products of the Year Awards 2022. The products chosen in this selection are based on long-term testing and/or formal reviews by our editorial staff.

2022 Audioholics POY Award Winners Youtube Discussion

Best AV Receiver

Anthem MRX-1140 | Review | Buy

MSRP: $4,199

The Anthem MRX-1140 is a 11CH AV receiver rated at 140wpc x 5 (Class AB) and 60wpc x 6 (Class D) with up to 15.2 channels of processing. It isn't the most powerful AV receiver you can buy in it's price class but we guarantee it's among the easiest to set up and get great sound out of the box with the least amount of fuss or calibration expertise required. This is largely due to the excellent PC user interface and incredible ARC Genesis Room Correction system that has been refined over the years. The latest version of ARC Genesis does a stellar job at phase aligning your speakers with your subs to get a seamless blend that just works at making your system sound fully integrated with no holes in the bass between your main LCRs and sub(s). ARC Genesis is run remotely from a laptop or PC on the same network freeing you from the tether of a microphone cable attachment to the AVR like most of its competitors. This allows installers to calibrate the AVR even if it's not in the same room as the display device or attached speaker system. The MRX-1140 has a squeaky clean preamp out section making it the ultimate AV processor should you decide to later level up power and repurpose  the internal Class AB amps to power your height channels or another zone of audio. Anthem ARC Genesis may not be as tweakable as DIRAC or Audyssey MultiEQ-X PC but in our experience, it consistently gives the best results with the least fus