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Many features and simple to install. It isn't super powerful but sounds good in an average (medium sized) viewing area. I burned out a Pioneer before this. When I installed the Yamaha I noticed a much richer sound.
The Highs that this unit produces is great, while watching a movie it had me looking around my room because it sounded so real.But the silver color is a little hard to find matching equipment, but i'll work it out.Overall, nice job Yamaha. It hits ALL of the lows when I want to get a little urban, and nice with Rock music(my favorite). Well the reason why I gave this product 4 Stars is because it was at first complicated to equalize the speakers. But I ended up figuring it out myself without the manual(its a guy thing) And the sound is GREAT, my subwoofer that I thought wasnt that good ended up sounding a thousand times better with this guy, than my previous unit.
Another difference was the lack of a jog dial to cycle through inputs and other menu options. The thing that led me to this receiver was past experience with Yamaha home theater products, price point of this unit, and the audio-delay feature, also known as lip sync correction. panels).My first impression when I took the receiver out of the box was the weight. Overall, for $155.00 I am pleased with the purchase. When a digital 5.1 signal is detected, the screen changes to read Dolby Digital.
Finally, this unit did not have binding posts for all the speakers, just the main A and B. After a day or two of playing with the menus, they become slightly more user friendly. This worried me, as weight is sometimes an indicator of performance and sound quality in a receiver/amplifier. Setup on these Yamaha receivers is tricky at first.
I give this unit a 7 out of 10, which would have been higher, had I not been in a position to do A-B sound comparisons with another Yamaha unit. It was not nearly as heavy as the Yamaha receiver it was replacing. After that is complete, you are only left with bass and treble adjustments. The reason I decided to look for a new receiver was because many of the HD channels from FiOS TV would have terrible lip sync issues when running the optical signal directly to the receiver and the HDMI cable from the receiver directly to the TV. I purchased this receiver about a month ago for use in a home theater set up which consists of 2 Polk R50 floor standing speakers, a csi3 center channel, and no surrounds (they will be added at a later date, and most likely be Polk monitor 30 2-ways.
Compared to the menus used a few years back, they are actually improved. The whole wattage rating system in consumer level home theater receivers is not all that it is cracked up to be. It was priced at 299.99 when I purchased it, and is a 6.1 channel home theater receiver. Part of the initial setup includes telling the receiver how many speakers are in your setup, what the size of the drivers is, whether or not you want bass to be played through all the speakers or just the front, and then the speaker distances from the listener position. Many other factors come into play which will have more of an impact on sound quality than nominal wattage figures.
Signal is optical running directly from my FiOS receiver. I actually had been using a Yamaha receiver in this set up, which I purchased from Best Buy a few years back when I worked their my freshman year of college. Compared to the older unit, which was rated at 75 watts per channel, the sound quality is definitely not as good. I have played around with the various surround modes and I have come to like the traditional pro-logic setting the best. The display on the receiver notifies you of the type of signal it is receiving when your input is digital, whether it is a coaxial digital connection or through one of the two optical inputs the receiver has. It does not sound as crisp, is not as accurate, and one must push up the bass and treble to make up for this.
With 1 coax digital in and 2 optical, there is room for a digital tv receiver, a dvd player, and another digital device (blueray, hd dvd, ps3 etc). Also, the audio delay circuit which allows the user to delay the sound from 1 to 100 milliseconds in one millisecond intervals works as advertised. At that price, when the 7.1 channel receivers with full 1080P HDMI connections and all that fun stuff come down in the next few years, it will not be as hard on the wallet to replace this one.
However, the silver lining on all this is that the receiver does sound good for its purpose as a home theater reliever. It was model HRT-5640, and throughout this review I made various comparisons to it, for it was the first Yamaha receiver I had experience with. Most prime time TV shows are broadcast in Dolby Digital.
It is counter intuitive in many instances and navigating through the menu options is quite annoying at times. After hours of research I found out that this was a common problem among HD broadcasts and LCD TV's (I have a Sony 46V3000 which I love and prefer to the ever popular Samsung x61 x65 etc. The surrounds and center were left with cheap feeling clip-in terminals, which did not easily accept my Monster Cable XP speaker wire.
5 speakers and you can only add bass or treble to two. You can only adjust the bass and treble on the two front speakers. I hope all your source material is perfect or you will feel like I do and never buy Yamaha products again. I was excited when I ordered this amp, great price free shipping. But it has a huge flaw.
No annoying hiss.Fast shipping. Sound is clear. Great sound. I use it for my SONY SSB1000.
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