As I posted in another thread I am planning to purchase the new Denon line of A/V receiver - either the 3806 ($1299 list) or the 4306 ($1999 list). For that $700 difference, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of extras that come with the 4306 unless you count the extra 10 watts per channel (120 versus 130), which to me is almost useless since I am in an apartment and have to watch the volume anyway. For future, who knows... but I don't anticipate buying a house for a few years now given the absurd appreciation in the housing market (hey, it works both ways, I made a ton when me and my ex-wife sold ours and split the equity!)... But I digress as usual. haha

The real practical difference between the 3806 and the 4306 is that the latter has THREE HDMI inputs, while the former only has two.

My question, then, is what do you anticipate the HDMI inputs being useful for? Will I regret it if I only get two and need a third? Right now I only anticipate needing two - one for my cable box (no cable card in my tv) and one for my DVD player.

I have recently read about the limitations and possible changes to the HDMI spec, which has me a bit scared. But since I've already gone and purchased a television with HDMI input, I guess I'm stuck with HDMI 1.1 - it almost sounds like, from what I read, that v1.2 or v1.3 will not be backwards compatible. Lovely. Oh well. Like a salesman told me... you will ALWAYS be waiting for something to come along (two-way cable card communication, for instance), and even tho I didn't buy from him, I took his advice to heart, bit the bullet, and started shelling out the profit I made off our house. :-)

If you can think of a third common A/V device that I might wish to plug into the receiver using HDMI in the near future, let me know. I can't think of any and can't see shelling out the extra $700 for the 4306 at the moment. I'm not an "early adopter" (can't you tell? haha), so I don't anticipate getting into any HD-DVD or BluRay DVD craze anytime soon (yeah, I know - one look and I'll bite! haha).

Thanks to everyone for all the advice - it is very much appreciated!