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More for Less
Yamaha packs features o’plenty in this receiver/ player combo.

This system—the $1,900 RX-V4600 A/V receiver and $750 DVD-S2500 universal player—is the least expensive system in this roundup, but it doesn’t skimp on features. The THX Select2–certified RX-V4600 is a seven-channel receiver (130 watts per channel) that you can set up in a number of ways. You can power seven speakers and enjoy Dolby EX or DTS ES soundtracks, you can bi-wire your front speakers in a five-channel setup, or you can send stereo audio to a second zone. There’s also a set of speaker terminals for presence speakers or a third zone, but you’ll need another amp for these.

The RX-V4600 includes YPAO, or the Yamaha Parametric Room Acoustic Optimizer, which uses a small microphone and audio signals built into the receiver to test your audio system and optimize the receiver’s settings to improve sound quality.

Digital-friendly is an understatement in the connection realm. The receiver has two HDMI inputs and one output, two FireWire ports, and nine digital audio inputs. For the analog-inclined, it has three component video ins and one out, and it transcodes S-video and composite video signals to component video.

The receiver uses Yamaha’s YPAO automatic setup procedure, a quick, easy way to check your wiring; set speaker size, level, and distance; and apply EQ to tailor the speakers to your room. There’s only one problem. The on-screen display doesn’t work through the HDMI connections. If you want to view the setup menu on your TV screen, you have to use an analog video connection. So I reluctantly fished a component video cable out of the trash and connected it to my TV. This isn’t an all-digital deal breaker, though, since you can use the receiver’s front-panel display to access the menus. It just isn’t as quick.

I ran the YPAO setup procedure several times and got different results—twice it set all my RBH speakers to large, and once it set only the front towers to large and gave the rest of the bookshelf speakers a fairly high crossover setting of 100 hertz. More-advanced users will appreciate the ability to go into the menu and adjust these parameters to their liking; you can also manually adjust LFE level, tone controls, and audio delay to ensure that your audio and video are in sync. In terms of matching the speakers’ output level, YPAO did as good as job as I could do manually.