Our dusty old Harman Kardon receiver has died - after 16 years of service I guess that's to be

October 30, 2011

expected. It now puts me in the market for a replacement, and I whizzed through Harvey Norman's today to see what a replacement might look like. Replacements look... different! Everything seems to be HDMI, Blu-Ray, 7.1 stereo and network capable, but what do I choose? We don't own a television or blu-ray player (except laptops), and all of our music is two channels (I only have two speakers, in any case). The networking thing looks like it might be useful though, only... does it work with Linux? I'm sure some of you geeks out there can help recommend things to me! I assume that anything that can do 50W RMS per channel is way more than we'll need until Fraser turns 16, so I'm betting anything that supports RS-232 or Telnet will be way over spec for us from an audio point of view. What audio manufacturers are Linux friendly in this way? The (remarkably helpful) sales assistant who didn't even blink when I said I wanted something I could easily remote control with a few perl scripts pointed me at Denon and Marantz, but there must be other good choices too. Currently tending towards the Denon AVR1912, which I've found a full PDF manual explaining all of the simple commands available over telnet, or the Marantz NR-1602, which fits my form factor better, and which has a similarly well-documented capability. Are there other brands/models I should be considering?