Long ago, I used to sell audio/video gear for a living (not a very good living, I might add). Every once in a while, a kid would shuffle into the shop, produce a handful of crumpled bills — the fruit of much lawn-mowing or snow-blowing — and ask, “What can I get for this?”
In those days, the answer was usually, “Not much” (though since I was a salesman, I rarely put it that way). Today, I’d be able to reply enthusiastically, “How ’bout 100 watts times six channels, Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES decoding, Pro Logic II and Neo:6 surround processing, component-video switching, and a six-channel input for DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD?” And I wouldn’t be blowing smoke either, because $300 will buy you all that and more.
You can reap these affordable marvels from any number of manufacturers, and we picked three of the newest entry-level A/V receivers to represent their generation: the Onkyo TX-SR501, Panasonic’s SA-XR25S, and the Yamaha RX-V440 — all $300 list. Judging from these three, “entry-level” hardly means stripped down nowadays. These babies bring more to the table than any previous budget-price receivers I’ve tested.
So what don’t you get for your $300 compared with, say, the more upscale A/V receivers out there? Well, you don’t get the heftiest chassis in the world. You also give up a fair amount of input and output flexibility. For example, none of these receivers includes preamp outputs for the main channels. And at these prices, you don’t get extravagant features like extensive multiroom abilities and elaborate touchscreen remote controls.
You also don’t get much in the way of FM radio finesse. All three receivers had only fair weak-signal abilities, and they tended to overload on very strong local stations, with audible effects or “popping through” over weak adjacent signals (or both). But so what? In the critical tasks of multichannel amplifying and surround sound processing, each receiver was more than competent.
PDF: Features and Specs
Yamaha RX-V440
The Yamaha RX-V440 has big-receiver looks that hinge on its two-knob front panel — one for volume, one for input selection — and the generous size and spacing of its primary controls. (But I was disappointed by its dim panel lettering. There’s plenty of room for larger, brighter type.) The controls feel a good deal nicer than I expected a $300 box to manage, and the V440’s overall heft was the most solid of the three. One small surprise was that the front-panel set of convenience inputs has only stereo line-level audio and composite-video jacks — no S-video.
The reason became clearer when I turned to the back panel: the V440 has no S-video paths at all, relying on its two component-video inputs (a feature shared by all three receivers) for high-quality A/V sources. This saves a few bucks, obviously, and covers the essential bases of a progressive-scan DVD player and either an HDTV tuner, a high-def satellite receiver, or a video hard-disk recorder with a progressive-scan output. But if you have three or more such components, cable-swapping (or an external switch box) is in your future. The Yamaha also offers just two digital audio inputs and no digital outputs. (The V540, $100 more, adds another one of each — plus S-video jacks.) But the V440 does provide solid multiway binding posts for all its speaker outputs, including an extra stereo pair.
| YAMAHA RX-V440 | |
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DIMENSIONS 17 1/8 x 6 3/8 x 15 3/8 inches WEIGHT 24 pounds PRICE $300 MANUFACTURER Yamaha, Dept. S&V, 6660 Orangethorpe Ave., Buena Park, CA 90620; www.yamaha.com; 800-492-6242 |
I found the RX-V440’s setup routine a bit confusing. In common with our two other receivers, the Yamaha lacks onscreen displays, so you must use the front-panel readout. You press Set Menu and then use the cursor keys to navigate a skein of basic menus determining the number of speakers and whether there’s a subwoofer in your system. Separate menu trees access individual speaker-size and digital-input assignments, a five-band, center-channel graphic equalizer, and a few more features. I had no real problems with any of this, but someone getting his first taste of the joys of multichannel home theater setup — a likely customer for this receiver — might have a little trouble.
If that newbie pays attention, though, he’ll be well rewarded for his efforts, since the Yamaha performed exceptionally well at the key surround sound challenges. It had no difficulty with any of my standard Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES movie-soundtrack checks, showing excellent detail and plenty of dynamic reserves. The Yamaha should provide ample power for most speaker systems and rooms; it sounded clean, clear, and effortless even at demanding volumes on a range of multichannel tracks from DVD-Audio discs and SACDs.
For those with a large stereo library (and isn’t that all of us?), the RX-V440 offers the broadest array of options of our three receivers. A downsized but still potent selection of Yamaha’s Hi-Fi and Cinema-DSP surround palettes amounts to a baker’s dozen of digital signal processing modes and variants — not counting Dolby Pro Logic II (DPL II) and DTS Neo:6 — with nary a turkey among them. Yamaha uses reverb and delay in all channels of some modes, but they’re carefully and realistically enough derived that I didn’t find the effect objectionable.
What’s more, you get to tweak the overall delay and DSP effect levels for each mode, giving you an impressive potential to match the mode to the music or movie of the moment. For instance, I usually prefer my film sound straight up, but the V440’s Enhanced Dolby EX option made the clean and competent but otherwise somewhat narrow and flat soundtrack of The Good Thief subtly more alive and involving, especially in quiet interior scenes.
As irritating as I found the Yamaha’s setup routine, its remote control was best in show by a slim margin over Panasonic’s. Rather than trying anything fancy, Yamaha was content with spacing its buttons generously, using a variety of shapes and sizes, and intelligently organizing key-families by function or type. The white-on-gray of the primary lettering is legible, too. The handset also manages to provide direct-access keys both for the receiver’s main surround modes and for its eight inputs — along with the requisite TV volume, channel, and input keys — without feeling the least bit crowded. You even get two extra “input” keys for controlling components or systems (lighting, say) without changing receiver inputs — a very thoughtful touch. (Alas, like the other two remotes here, the Yamaha’s is preprogrammed only, with no way of learning obscure or obsolete codes from another remote.)
In short, Yamaha’s RX-V440 is an amply powered, fine-sounding receiver that’s easy and pleasant to use. It’s also nicely finished and attractive, and it packs an awful lot — much of it genuinely useful. For $300, what more could you ask?
Panasonic SA-XR25S
Panasonic’s entry is one of a new generation of A/V components that use digital amplifier circuitry to achieve a previously impossible combination of high power in a compact, lightweight component. The SA-XR25S weighs less than 9 pounds and stands less than 3 inches tall, yet it produces an honest 80 W x 6 in surround and more in stereo — quite a feat. (Digital amplifiers, increasingly common in home-theater-in-a-box systems and DVD-receiver combos, keep signals in the digital domain right up to the power-amp stages, where ultra-efficient “switching-type” circuits are used to both amplify and, in the process, convert to an analog, speakers-ready signal. This means, of course, that even analog sources like the AM/FM tuner or a tape deck must be converted to digital audio first — no analog purists need apply!)
Panasonic makes the most of the SA-XR25S’s slimness with a pared-down front panel whose controls include just volume, a single input-selector button, and a few tiny keys for tuner and surround modes. For everything else, you’ll need the remote. It’s just as well: the panel’s tiny lettering and miniature upper keys are all but impossible to read. The receiver’s rear panel is sparse, too, with just three A/V inputs and two audio-only ones, plus a pair of component-video inputs and the multichannel analog sextet required for a DVD-Audio or SACD player. The speaker outputs are economical spring-clip terminals for all but the front left/right channels.
| PANASONIC SA-XR25S | |
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DIMENSIONS 17 inches wide, 2 7/8 inches wide, 14 3/4 inches deep WEIGHT 8 3/4 pounds PRICE $300 MANUFACTURER Panasonic, Dept. S&V, One Panasonic Way, Secaucus, NJ 07094; www.panasonic.com; 800-211-7262 |
Although I wouldn’t mind more inputs, I have to confess that I admired the Panasonic’s svelte form enormously. I was thrilled to get real power out of such a Kate Moss chassis (a response, no doubt, to decades of lugging around heavy receivers and amplifiers of one sort or another).
Setup was relatively painless even though the SA-XR25S, like the others, lacks onscreen menus to guide the process, and its front-panel readout is pretty small. The Panasonic’s sole setup item of note is its Filter option, which lets you set its subwoofer crossover point to 100, 150, or 200 Hz. I’d have preferred the de facto standard of 80 Hz in place of the first (a small point), and the last is too high for all but the tiniest of satellite speakers. But the 150-Hz option might prove useful with small but otherwise capable speakers.
I tried hard to “hear” the Panasonic’s high-tech digital amps, honest I did. I threw all my usual critical-listening ammo at it, including the best-produced SACD and DVD-Audio discs — but I can’t say I had a lot of success. A couple of times I thought I heard a certain glassiness on dynamic peaks, as when Norah Jones’s voice on her Come Away with Me SACD goes from a breathy whisper to a tasteful belt in the space of a quarter-note. But I’m afraid this could have been a case of the golden ear yielding to the power of suggestion, or perhaps just simple amplifier clipping — yes, digital amps can run out of juice, too.
In any event, the XR25S sounded surprisingly excellent on all my music challenges, and it held the same firm line on movies. The Good Thief doesn’t make a lot of demands on the upper end of the dynamic scale, but there are plenty of mumbled and whispered lines, and the Panasonic delivered the necessary clarity to preserve the nuance and color of each one.
I found the XR25S easy to use, with a few modest reservations. As I mentioned, its small front-panel lettering is often hard to read — and the decorative fluorescent light-strip doesn’t help a bit. (This goes out when you select a “dimmer” option, but then the graphics are dimmer, too.) The remote control’s white-on-gray lettering no doubt springs from the same ergonomic genius. Still, the remote’s layout is sensible and its keys generously spaced, in part because secondary controls are behind a slide-down cover. In all, these factors make learning the controller fairly easy.
Like the other two receivers here, the Panasonic delivers the full range of Dolby Digital and DTS modes, including both 5.1- and 6.1-channel decoding, as well as DPL II and Neo:6 processing for stereo and Dolby Surround sources. Panasonic even throws in a decent selection of user-adjustable parameters for both DPL II and Neo:6, including the less common Panorama control for DPL II. The XR25S’s “extras” are limited to an Enhanced Surround option, which adds in the back surround speaker on most modes, and a handful of DSP ones — Hall, Live, Club, and the like — that tend to be too rich in slap-echo or “flanginess” to my ears.
In this, the Panasonic is hardly unique among A/V receivers, even much more expensive ones. And in most other respects, I liked the skinny little SA-XR25S a lot. It sounded every bit as good as I’d expect from a component of its price and utility — regardless of size. And with its mostly straightforward operation, it was easier and more pleasant to use than many other receivers I’ve encountered, even at twice the price and three times the bulk.
Onkyo TX-SR501
Onkyo’s $300 entry, the TX-SR501, is an unassuming, conventional-looking receiver, but it incorporates almost all the important stuff you’d expect from a far costlier, far fancier model. Like the other two receivers, it includes six-channel power, 6.1-channel surround modes from Dolby and DTS alike, component-video switching, and a multicomponent system remote control.
The face the SR501 shows the world is an unpretentious one, with a single large volume knob and the remaining controls — all pushbuttons — arranged around a fairly crowded multifunction display. The front panel’s white-on-black lettering is fairly crisp but small and hard to read.
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ONKYO TX-SR501 |
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DIMENSIONS 17 1/8 inches wide, 5 7/8 inches high, 14 3/4 inches deep WEIGHT 20 pounds PRICE $300 MANUFACTURER Onkyo USA, Dept. S&V, 18 Parkway, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458; www.onkyousa.com; 800-229-1687 |
Around back, the SR501 provides all six speaker outputs on standard-spaced multiway binding posts, the only one of our three receivers to do so. (The wide spacing of the Yamaha’s binding posts makes them incompatible with dual-banana plugs.) Otherwise, the back panel had the expected features, except that, as with the Yamaha, there’s no digital audio output at all. So for digital-domain dubbing (say, from CD player to CD recorder), you’ll have to make the link directly between components, which could become inconvenient if you make a lot of mix discs.
Setting up the Onkyo was easy enough, though (as with the other receivers) you need to use the front-panel readout for feedback since there’s no onscreen display. I was a bit surprised by the Onkyo’s speaker-setup routine. Unlike most receivers or processors, it doesn’t ask you to set the speaker “size” in each channel. Instead, you set Speakers Adjust to specify the number of speakers present (two through six) and then Subwoofer Mode to 1 (all speakers “small”), 2 (center and surround only “small”), or 3 (subwoofer/LFE only). This amounts to the same thing, mostly, and is likely to be less intimidating and confusing than the more usual, menu-driven “large/ small/none” choices. Better still, the SR501 lets you set the subwoofer crossover point at 60, 80, 120, or 150 Hz, a well-considered set of options. The first is perfect for systems like mine, in which every speaker can give a good account of itself down to that point, as it pushes the crossover that critical half-octave further from the sensitive vocal regions.
I was pleased to hear just how good the Onkyo sounded on the important jobs. Stereo playback was clean and detailed, especially on the high-resolution stereo layer of SACDs. Multichannel power and dynamics were first-rate as well, as a Telarc SACD of the Stravinsky warhorses Petrouchka and The Firebird Suite demonstrated abundantly. The Onkyo made a very convincing presentation of the demandingly wide-range opening of the Scherzo à la Russe that’s also on this disc, while displaying to great effect the delicate detail of Petrouchka’s vast array of exotic percussion instruments. One example was the arresting naturalness I heard from the triangle, something that a plain-vanilla CD can’t quite match.
Along with the usual bass and treble adjustments, the SR501 includes a Cinema Filter control you can engage in its movie modes. This sounded a lot like THX Re-Equalization to me, and it proved valuable for the occasional too-bright soundtrack. I was also pleased to find that the Onkyo includes the basic user controls for DPL II and Neo:6, namely, Center Image/Width, Panorama, and Dimension. The SR501’s four DSP modes for stereo listening are fairly ordinary, but only one (Orchestra) was offensively “reverby.”
The remote control is complete and compact but neither easy to use nor elegant. For example, putting the tiny master volume keys at the very bottom, arranged left-right instead of vertically, borders on the ergonomically criminal. Otherwise, the remote’s close-packed keys are fairly well organized, and its black-on-silver graphics would be decently legible if they were larger. As it was, I had to look carefully to locate much of anything beyond volume and mute — and I often had to use the forefinger of my other hand to pick out the desired button from among the crowd.
Of course, this shortcoming is easily remedied by one of the many third-party system remotes. And in any event, the TX-SR501’s compensations are many: excellent sonic transparency, a generous set of basic audio and video inputs and outputs, and a surprisingly solid flow of multichannel power.
Cheap Thrills
Actually, the above summation applies to all three receivers. Each has its faults — the Onkyo’s unhandy remote, the Panasonic’s minuscule panel graphics and controls, the Yamaha’s byzantine setup routines — but really, at this price, who cares? I was thrilled to discover just how well today’s entry-level A/V receivers perform. Put ’em behind a screen, and I’d challenge the most discerning audiophile among us to name that price.
Sure, if you’re assembling a serious, dedicated home theater, you’re probably going to want to look upscale a bit — or a lot — depending on your budget. But if $300 is all your A/V receiver line item can support, don’t worry: you can get performance that won’t disappoint you.
PDF: Features and Specs
PDF: In the Lab