Movie lovers dream

I purchased this unit to replace my older Nakamichi AV1 reciever. I am sad to see this unit go, but it didn't have any built in digital decoder. You required to have an external unit, and it only supported 5.1. That said, I would have to admit that it did sound night and day better than this Yamaha.

After looking around and listening to many units from Denon, Onkyo and Pioneer, I came to the conclusion that you couldn't get anything better sounding than a Yamaha for the price range that I was looking to spend. (I found that you needed to be spending upwards of $2000cad to get any significant improvement)

So what is it about Yamaha that makes it worth your while to look at? Glad you asked. If you are looking for a reciever for the sole purpose of movies, then this is it.

My Setup
I have a Toshiba RPTV that has two sets of componant inputs, along with three SVHS plugs. I use a Toshiba 2900 DVD player for DVD's, and an Expressvu PVR for TV. I have two Celestion DX8 speakers for the front, and DX3's for the rear. An Mirage 8" sub, and a Yamaha NL-110 center.

My Needs
The Toshiba RPTV is HDTV ready and does line doubling for all non HD input sources. This said, the picture from a SVHS cable compaired to a componant is very noticable. It shouldn't make all that much difference, and on all my other TV's in the house. After much research, I found that many other people have the same problem as I do, and that to solve the problem, you need to upconvert the SVHS to a component signal. My new system needed to fit this need. Also, it needed to support HDTV switching if I was going to run all video signals through the reciever.

My last stereo didn't support DTS as the external decoder didn't have that support. As many of the newer DVD's are encoded with DTS ES, or Dolby Digital EX for 6.1 sound, I wanted a system that supported at least 7.1 as I didn't want to get stuck with something that didn't have room to grow when the next generation of DVD's come out.

The final requirement that the replacement system needed to meet was being high current. The Nakamichi I had was a very high current unit. This gives the speakers the power they need without distorting the sound. (remember ohms law from highschool? P = E * I , or Power (watts) = Volts * Current. As current does a better job of moving the voice coils inside your speakers, you get a cleaner sound than you would from a high voltage reciever that has the same Wattage rating)

What I found
I found that the setup of this system left much to be desired. As it has been said many times, to error is human, to really screw things up requires a computer, or in my case a badly designed piece of electronics. When I purchased this unit, I didn't notice that it doesn't have any balance or sound test patterns. I by accident hooked up the left speaker to the right speaker 'B' output. By default, both A & B were turned on, so I got sound out of each speaker. Just not the correct sound.

I then hooked up the YPAO microphone to the system to let it calibrate itself. It ran it's set of tests doing the clicking and tones, then said everything was set. After playing some music I noticed that it just didn't sound correct. That is when I figured out my mistake by checking every wire and where it was hooked up. The YPAO didn't catch the mistake, and I find that a bit disturbing. Also, the YPAO doesn't give you any option of defining the size of your speakers before it does it's own tone equalization. I don't know if that makes any difference in the settings. In my case, it defined the Celestian DX3 bookshelf speakers as being large, when they should by all counts be small.

I have read that you should set all your speakers to being small, and let your sub woofer do all the low range sound. My Sub does have the power and the range to handle it. (I set the cross over at about 80hz)

The remote also leaves much to be desired. It does have an option to program, but I personally would recomend getting the RX-V657 and putting the savings into a harmony remote.

I have a Philips Pronto, and managed to find a set of remote funtions for controling the Zone2 funtion. Why this is not on the remote that ships with the reciever I don't know.

The unit also defaults on startup to zone2 being on. This is just wrong as I have them hooked up to outside. Now when I turn on my reciever, the neighbours sometimes get a stereo playing until the macro turns off the zone2.

The volume control on this unit seems to be off if you are use to a true high current system. The unit is rated at 100watts, and by comparison to my Nakamichi, this is over stated. to get the same sound pressure volume, you need to have the volume turned up almost 75% max to get the same sound I go from 15% on the Nakamichi. I was told that this is because the Yamaha is digital, but it gets me worried that you are going to run out of power and start to clip as you need to turn it up so much. I will need to do more research to get this solved.

Conclusion
Dispite all the bad things that I have found with the unit.. it does have some very strong points. As far as a home theater goes, it does an awsome job. You can watch movies with a set of headphones on and still get a reasonable 3d effect.
DTS and Dolby Digital decoding is very clean, and the sound for movies is awesome. That is what I purchased it for. For that reason I give it recomended mark.