There are several chips within many of the Yamaha receivers that may be upgradable through a firmware update. This would be done by connecting the 9 pin serial port on the back of your computer to the 9 pin serial port on the back of the Yamaha receiver.
What you can do right now: Yamaha has a program that allows you to store to your PC the settings that are in your room. You can load settings from your PC to the A/V receiver using this program, or you can tell your computer to determine what settings are currently being used by the receiver. These two things are really useful features.
WHY?
1. If you have a couple of different speaker locations or different ways you may set your room up... Perhaps you have a center channel that sits in front of a fireplace. Or you may do something trick like have good speakers on the floor, but also have in ceiling speakers that you swap out when you have parties and hide your good speakers so they don't get damaged. In just a few minutes you can switch your receiver's configuration so it reflects the current setup of the room.
2. You spend hours carefully tweaking your A/V receiver until it just sounds perfect in the room. You then have your PC record the settings and save the file to your PC. A week later a pipe bursts and drenches your A/V receiver. So, you go get a new one, and five minutes later it is up and running with the exact same settings you had in it before.
Now, what is it MOST commonly used for?
Control! The RS-232 ports on your Yamaha, plasma, Denon, projector, DSS box (low-speed data port), Digital Jukebox (iMerge/Escient/etc.), VCR (rarely), etc are all used to control the device from a high end control system like Crestron (
www.crestron.com). The Yamaha protocols are excellent and include pre-written macros for integrators that allow us to turn on and off the receiver, make almost all adjustments, get full feedback as to current settings, and control all zones with that one connection on the back of the receiver!
Projectors often report bulb hours and usage amounts.
VCRs will let you know when you are recording something.
DSS boxes can report the current channel and allow direct access to any channel (this is instant channel changing and is very cool).
Mostly what I look for is the minimum requirements: Power on, power off, input selection. Any product that offers that in a basic format through RS-232 receives at least a passing grade to me.
RS-232 protocols are available from Yamaha's website - I do not know if they have the setup program available to the general public from their website or not.
