RXV-1400 Nice Product, easy set up.

Author's Rating:

Pros: YPAO, Build Quality, Sound.

Cons: YPAO equalization not as good as I had hoped.

The Bottom Line: 
Good sound, easy setup.

Author's Review
The RXV-1400 sits squarely as Yamaha’s mid priced receiver. What this means to the consumer is lots of trickle down from their high-end receivers with power and features that were unimaginable just a couple of years ago. You’ll find that it has plenty of power, digital and analog inputs, video up-conversion, THX select rating, digital Top-Art construction and Yamaha’s newest gadget YPAO or Yamaha Parametric Room Acoustic Optimizer.

One of the reasons I purchased the receiver was see if the THX rating made any difference in the sound and quality of a piece of equipment with the rating. As far as actually using the THX equalization, I’m not all that impressed, as my Marantz receiver has a cinema equalization feature that I feel sounds better than the THX equalization. In any event, THX branding does guarantee a that a receiver will maintain a certain level of continuos power through all channels. With that guarantee, you’re sure to get a pretty good power supply, capacitors etc..

In the 70’s and 80’s Yamaha had a reputation for some very fine amps and receivers. I wasn’t sure how they were doing recently, as I had read some reviews that said that the Yamaha’s were overly bright, and focused on home theatre rather than music. I don’t know if things have changed since that review came out, but I found that the RXV-1400 doesn’t take a back seat to the main competitors on music. I tried several SACD and DVD-A discs, as well as DTS discs and CDs, and found that they all sound great. I don’t think the sound is as warm as the Denon receivers, but more so than the Harman Kardon receivers. As far as dynamics, the Yamaha was the equal to anything available at a similar price and would give many high-end receiver a run for their money.

In actual use the Yamaha was pretty good. The remote doesn’t have any macro buttons to turn on the entire system and set it up, but does have separate power buttons for the receiver, AV source and TV. Aside from the macro issue the remote is easy to use, and pretty well laid out.

Another plus is that the manual setup is pretty easy. The on-screen menus are logical and will lead you right through it with a minimum of fuss. Of course if you use the YPAO, you won’t need to worry about that. Another nice feature is that all digital inputs are assignable.

The YPAO was a mixed bag for me. While it accurately set up my speakers size, distance and volume, I was disappointed with the equalization part. While there are different options for the equalization, I wasn’t particularly happy with any of them. I tried the room equalization, which seemed a little heavy on the high end. I next tried the speaker equalization, which tries to make all the speakers sound the same, and then the flat equalization. In all cases I felt that it left the lower mid-range lacking. I don’t know if my hearing isn’t as good as it used to be, but I preferred no equalization at all. For those of you who want to do your own tweaking, you can’t manually adjust the parametric equalizer (rumored to be available on the RXV-1500), but Yamaha does provide access to a graphic equalizer in the set-up menu. In any event you can use YPAO to get the sound level and distances correct and select no equalization to make for an incredibly easy setup.

One thing I am very impressed with on the Yamaha is the quality of their digital signal processing. Most receivers take a second of two to decode the type of signal being input before sound comes out. The Yamaha is almost instantaneous. I usually don’t take a lot of stock in manufacturer’s claims, but perhaps Yamaha’s proprietary YSS-938 chip is really as good as Yamaha says it is. It’s certainly faster than the one’s in the Denon or Marantz models I have to compare.

In short I don’t think you can go wrong buying the RXV-1400. Nice build quality, good sound and automatic setup with YPAO. If you can’t find one in the low $500 range, you might try looking for a Yamaha HTR-5790, as it is the same model with different cosmetics. The advantage with the HTR series is that it is readily available at mass electronics stores such as Best Buy and on the internet, whereas the RXV series is meant to be sold only at specialty stores.