Whilst the HTP072 is a good entry-level surround system for similar money to the typical all-in-ones sold by Currys, if your budget is up to £400-£500 then you really need to know where the compromises have been made in the Pioneer to hit its £250 price point. More importantly, you also need to know and understand how those compromises will affect you further down the line. Once you have the full picture then you'll be in a much better and far more informed position to decide if those compromises are important to both now and in the future.
The second thing to say is that routing all audio via the TV is a really bad idea when you have the flexibility and performance of an AV Receiver.
TV's do not pass audio in the highest quality formats from any HDMI-connected source. In fact they dumb it down to the lowest possible audio format: basic stereo. This means you can wave goodbye to the very best quality HD audio from Blu-rays, and goodbye too to DTS and probably Dolby Digital. Every audio format that has discrete channels for the centre, fronts, rears and subs all get mashed down to basic stereo only. Don't get me wrong, an AV receiver will have a surround made called ProLogic II for making stereo in to pseudo surround but quite honestly that's not a patch on the sound you can get from movies and games in discrete surround. If you can play the sound as it is recorded in its highest quality of the disc or out of the console or PC then it will sound far better.
Let's deal with the Pioneer HTP072...
The good stuff: multiple HDMI inputs (4 in, 1 out) and 4K pass thru; one each optical and digital coax input; comes complete with Pioneer speaker package which means it's very competitively priced for the performance.
Stuff that's not so good: no Audio Return Channel (ARC) feature on the TV HDMI socket at this price level; the power specs (100W/ch) are very very optimistic, they are measured at high distortion and with one channel driven so a realistic figure would be closer to 40W per channel; The pioneer speakers are adequate but built down to a price, they'd be the first candidate for any future upgrades; This brings us the the Achilles heel which is the sub and how it connects to the amp. It uses speaker terminals just like the rest of the speakers. That means that the sub is really just a bigger passive speaker in a box rather than an active sub where there's a separate power amp built in to the subwoofer. Active subs are pretty much the standard way of doing bass in proper home cinema systems. The built-in amp reduces the workload on the AV receiver so the surround speakers get more juice and sound sweeter. A passive sub also affects the used value of the speakers should you ever decide to upgrade. Very few AV receivers have the speaker terminals for a passive sub, so it's hard to shift one. That kind of means there's no value in a used passive sub, and it's much harder to buy a better replacement since passive subs are not a popular choice.
So what should you be looking at as alternatives? It would be good to have ARC, better speakers and an active sub. A little more power wouldn't go amiss either.
The Yamaha RX-V377 AV receiver ticks most of those boxes. It is available packaged with speaker kits (including an active sub) from Tannoy and Wharfedale and with prices starting from £349 and so the various combinations tick all the boxes.
Tannoy and Wharfedale are both well respected specialist speaker manufacturers, and the speaker kits bundled by retailers with the Yam 377 receiver stand up in their own right as good choices for AV surround. Have a look at Tannoy TFX5.1, Tannoy HTS101, and Wharfedale DX1.
