List Price: $499.95
Sale Price: $409.00
Today's Bonus: 18% Off
I have upgraded an older AVR 235 Harman Kardon receiver who gave-up on me after a long struggle with regular interruptions. Even after sending it for repairs during the warranty, it came back with the same issue. Anyway, I grew tired of smashing it :) so, in a way, I'm happy it permanently stopped working.
Now, I'm pleasantly surprised with the quality with this Yamaha receiver and with the technological advancements. Most probably HK made similar progress as well, but I was reluctant to buy another Harman Kardon after the problems I had with the previous one.
The big surprise came after setting up the system using the YPAO microphone. I couldn't understand why my very large front Infinity speakers were always set to small, while the smaller surround speakers were set to large.
Several attempts and a lot of attention paid to the sweep sounds generated during the test, made me realize that one of my front speakers had poor bass. After a careful analysis, I discovered that one of the metal blades connecting the bi-wiring connectors went missing! I understand now why I had hard time equalizing the response of the old receiver, despite using special tools for it! Thanks to this new simple but thorough set-up system, the quality of my sound is dramatically improved. I just ordered additional speaker cables to make full use of the nice bi-amp feature of the new Yamaha. This feature is almost hidden and I wonder why it is not advertised in the specs. 5.1 with bi-amp might be better than 7.1.
Another nice upgrade is the perfect sync between the TV and the receiver, they talk to each other well, being able to turn them both on-off from the TV remote, or make use of the HDMI bypass feature if only the receiver is switched off. Same thing goes when using the bluray player, all units are turned on when the BD button is pressed and all units are switched off when switching the TV off. The volume can be adjusted from all the remotes and it switches automatically from the receiver to the internal TV speakers when the receiver is off.
I also like the way the my old classic iPod interface works. The TV screen shows the song names, etc with album art while the info button on the remote allows the titles to be shown on the receiver's display. It is great to be able to have 80gigs of high quality music without switching CDs. I'm emphasizing this because there are only a few streaming devices out-there able to play lossless files (ie. my new Sony bluray streams only the lossy mp3s). Too bad the USB port is on the front panel, I would have preferred that white USB cable to be hidden
Speaking about high-quality lossless audio, another upgrade for me is the possibility to decode the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. I have a few BD concerts and this option brings them a second life.
I have also tested the up-scaling and the video component input forwarding to the HDMI output. It worked well. However, HDMI to HDMI is the ideal solution and I think I noticed a quality improvement when I connected the cable box with a second HDMI cable.
The "universal" remote control is decent, I mapped all my other remotes to it. While I can use it alone for the most frequent actions, I found myself missing some buttons from time to time (like the audio/subtitle buttons from the bluray and a few other navigation buttons from the Comcast remote).
Summarizing, the first contact is positive.
Update: On a few occasions, after switching to the iPod interface, I couldn't move beyond the "Loading" message. The solution was to unplug-plug the iPod (or even to reboot it). So I have to get up from my couch, from time to time, after all :)
0 comments:
Post a Comment