My 2 cents (and then some).... I just did an install for a customer 2 weeks ago who got a Yamaha RX-V1600 for Christmas. We hooked up a Canton - Movie CD 201 system I sold him along with a 42" Hitachi Plasma. The speakers sounded great (they always do
) but the receiver was brutal to work with. We did a zone 2 in another room and added some out door speakers.... terrible interface and set up for that. TERRIBLE! The worst issue we ran into was the HDMI interfacing with the TV. One quirk: If the Yamaha receiver is on and does not receive a return "handshake" from the video display it continuously flashes an "HDMI ERROR" message across its front display. According to Yamaha tech support this only happens with some brands and they don't know which, so don't ask them (however, I can tell you that Hitachi Director Series plasmas are one of the brands that has this problem). There is no way to turn it off. When would this be a problem? If you just wanted to listen to a CD or Radio station and not have the TV on this message pops up and you can't read the display. Everything works and sounds fine, but the receiver acts like it's really having a problem. Turn the TV on, the handshake is made, and it goes away until the TV is off again. Their zone 2 remote is garbage and is the only thing worse than the main system remote. I won't even begin to get into that or the other issues we had with the HDMI signals. In respect to the HDDVR cable box there was also no difference between component video or HDMI (I a/b’d for the customer and he couldn’t tell) when running through the receiver. For cabling we used all Impact Acoustic Sonic Wave & RapidRun.
Yamaha tech support was terrible and I felt like I was educating them on HDMI, HDCP, and cable box technologies. The only worse tech support I've ever had was from Jamo on one of their A-BUS systems. Oddly enough in the middle of all this my Elan rep mentioned to me that he also reps for Yamaha and wanted to gauge my interest in carrying the brand. Needless to say, he got an ear full about the problems I was having with the product….. but he didn’t dispute what I was saying nor did he have any solutions for fixing the problems about the video processing.
All of the receivers you mentioned have very similar offerings at that price point. Yamaha, Denon, Onkyo, take your pick and you'll be happy. As far as video processing goes the Onkyo stuff is easy to set up, but not great on the picture. Denon seems to be the best right now (my opinion) out of the brands you listed. As a company, they work hard to stay cutting edge with their video integration. And, no, I'm not a big Denon guy either. NAD is coming out very soon with HDMI on their new receivers. I would hold out for those models if you can wait because the NAD product does have a great sound to it and in my opinion the audio from NAD is superior to the brands you are considering. Need something right now and want an alternative to Denon? Look at the Harman Kardon models that do HDMI. Their video processing is very good as well.
For the Yamaha guys out there…. I am not downing the sound of the Yamaha product. It sounded very good and my customer was as pleased as he could be. When comparing it to like brands I don’t think it has any weakness when it comes to sound quality. I am only dogging the video processing capabilities, set up, and remote controls because it was a nightmare. There… I am finally done.
