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This is my first Yamaha A/V receiver in over 8 years and I must say Yamaha have practically kocked it out of the park with the RX-A2020.
First of all a bit about my setup: I'm running all in-wall/in-ceiling speakers with separate amplifiers bypassing the amplification of the RX-A2020. The room is a very large 30x40 with 19ft ceilings quite a bit of space to fill with sound!!! The previous A/V receiver running my setup was an Onkyo TX-NR709.
The first thing you'll notice when you pull the RX-A2020 out of the box is its build quality which far exceeds the average A/V receiver in both finish and heft. The second thing you'll notice is Yamaha does not include a paper manual, just a simple quick-start sheet. The manual is on CD-Rom, so if you don't have an optical drive handy, dang Macbook air, you'll have to resort to downloading the manual from the Yamaha website. Downloading the manual is a somewhat tedious endeavor as you must register for an account with Yamaha. But hey who needs the manual right??? Uh, I did. I'm a tech-savvy early adopter but the RX-A2020 includes so many settings and Yamaha-isims (proprietary Yamaha features) that you will be hard pressed to understand what all the settings do unless you read the manual.
That said, you can simply plug in your components, plug in the YPAO Room EQ mic (included with the RX-A2020) set the mic in the sweet spot of your room and hit the auto button and let the RX-A2020 do its thing. The resulting audio and surround processing is nothing short of astonishing!!! Even my wife, who thinks her clock radio from 1996 sounds great, noticed an immediate difference and improvement in the sound quality when viewing movies and television. Compared to the Onkyo the tonal balance is vastly improved and there is much better and pronounced channel separation and seemingly smoother transitions between the channels. An added benefit, as compared to the Onkyo, is the Yamaha runs much, much, cooler in my enclosed custom A/V cabinet. This hopefully will contribute to longevity but time will tell.
The iPhone app that Yamaha has developed is very slick and easy to use as long as you have the RX-A2020 connected via etherent cable to your network as there is no wireless built-in. Speaking of the iPhone, the slickest function that I find myself using all the time, despite a Sonos system in the same room, is the Airplay feature. The integration is super-slick as you never have to leave the iTunes interface on your iPhone even if the RX-A2020 is turned off! Simply select the song you want to play as you normally would when listing to your iPhone/iPod/iPad, hit the funky box with an arrow button next to the volume slider pick the RX-A2020 and boom the RX-A2020 powers on, turns on my separate amplifiers, and fills the room with your selected song. The volume slider and the side volume buttons on your Phone/iPod/iPad control the volume on the RX-A2020.
If I were to criticize Yamaha it would be for the on-screen menus which look somewhat lo-res and dated, but once you get things setup you'll really never have to revisit those. I can't comment as to the power of the built in amplification or the remote as I am not using either of those but the surround processing is simply phenomenal!!!
Overall, highly recommended!
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