Customer Reviews

Yamaha RX-N600 Digital Network-Ready Home Theater Receiver

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As the proud owner of a new Yamaha RX-N600 I wanted to comment on some of the issues I have heard of with this product. Most of the issues are really not issues at all, they just need to properly set up the RX-N600 and the products they use with it.

I have heard people say that the RX-N600 can't handle iPod video. It does, but to make it work you need to turn ON the video output of your iPod and it works great. Both videos and photos are displayed on your TV and the iPod is controllable with the RX-N600 remote control.

I've also heard people say that the Net/USB doesn't work with an MP3 player. Here again, I found that all I needed to do was set my MP3 player (or for that matter my Cellphone MP3 player) to be a mass storage device and the Net/USB works perfectly!

The last, and to me most important problem I have heard about is that people say the Network music won't work with Microsoft Media Player 11. At first I found the same problem, but when I called Yamaha Tech Support, they were very helpful. They e-mailed me an RX-N600 software update file, which I installed through the RX-N600 USB port. It worked perfectly the first time I tried it. I now have no trouble streaming music from my PC to the RX-N600.

All of the above, plus I love having access to internet radio through my RX-N600. If you don't know about this, it's like a TV-Guide for internet radio stations all over the world - 2,000 of them! With the on-screen menu, you just point and click to pick a country, a genre, etc. It's really amazing and very enjoyable. I don't think anyone else is manufacturing a product that gives you all of this, plus a really good A/V home theater receiver anywhere near this price. Keep up the good work Yamaha!

I have had this unit for about 2 weeks now. Sound is as good as anything in this price range. I was coming from a Sony 900 series receiver which was failing. This is my first Yamaha. No other manufacturers had networking capability that didn't cost 3 times as much. Plan on spending most of a day setting this up unless you do that kind of thing often.

Most of my comments center around the networking and USB functions because that's why I bought it, to perhaps eliminate my PC as a music source and go direct from this receiver. We'll, it kinda works... The remote is a bit of a sore spot too as with just a bit more functionality it could have been really good, I could have gotten down to one remote but unfortunately it does not control my cable set top box.

Strengths
* Works great with my Sony VCR, remote controls everything nicely.
* Ipod dock (an extra item purchased separately) seems to work very well. Does not play Ipod video though. Remote controls this too
* Nice remote, after you figure it out it is pretty logical. Controls 3 of my 4 components nicely.
* Internet radio is a real winner, seems to have jillions of stations arranged fairly logically by locale. It would be very difficult to duplicate this on your PC unless you enrolled in a pay service. Its like having a short wave radio.

Near misses
* Remote works great with my Sony DVD player, but make sure you have the side switch on "source" to control play, fast forward, etc. Otherwise you won't be able to move the cursor through DVD menus that appear in the movie menu and make choices on how the movie plays.
* If the Remote could just have a little learning it would be great. You won't know if it will control your unit until you try it out. The list of remote codes that Yamaha supplies is vague, does not list models just a bunch of codes for each manufacturer. You just have to try each one for your manufacturer and see if any work. Hit or miss.
* Net/USB did not work with my Creative Zen Nomad jukebox MP3 player, but did work with a Corsair Memory 2gb flash voyager stick. Go figure. I did notice recently that I can set my Zen to act as a mass storgae unit, and to be fair I have not tried that yet.

Weaknesses
* Network music does not work with Microsoft Media Player 11, only 10. I called Yamaha and they said Media Player 11 was not supported. The N600 does not connect reliably to the media library store, sometimes it works fine, sometimes it errors out or just shows an empty list. Very finicky. Media player 11 is in beta so beware, it will become mainsteam shortly and is not supported. I'm not sure if/how Yamaha will remedy this for me.
* Plays wave, WMA and MP3 but not Itunes
* Crude character interface display for the Net/USB functions, like looking at a pong game on an old IBM CGA PC. About as much functionality as a typical MP3 player, you have to scroll through a page at a time in everything. A pain in the neck if you have a large music collection
* Will not control my Motorola DCT700 Comcast cable box, I tried all the Motorola codes and Yamaha says that's all there is, if they don't work you are outta luck. I am.
* Remote has no learning capability.
* Limited inputs for other components, but enough for what I need
* Documentation is OK but the manual is all there is. There is no FAQ or deeper level of detail on their website or anywhere else that I could find. You have to call Yamaha and you will get a live person, but from what I found from 2 calls is they didn't know any more than the manual.

Conclusion: Would I buy this again? Probably not because the networking is so limited, and that was the main reason I selected this model. If you buy a good receiver and go with an attached high quality PC/soundcard you'd be better off. The Yamaha interface does not come anywhere close to the ease of use and nice presentation you get on any PC media player program. That's like comparing a typewriter to using a PC with Word. The USB feature is nice but could be a lot better if it supported more devices.

I researched several yamaha units before settling on the RX-N600. I was skeptical about the network portion of the features. But after using the features I can see unlimited posibilities. Prior to this unit I had a creative external soundcard to get 5.1 out to my 3 small amps. I was happy that I also found a way to incorporate my creative unit into the Yamaha. I can hook up the optical out on the creative along with s video out on my laptop and use windows media player visual through my big screen LCD. It looks great and get a lot of remarks at parties. Now about the standard features of the Yamaha. It does not have the Yamaha auto setup for surround, but with some tweaking you can get almost perfect right away. At the end of my review I will post several important tips to get full enjoyment and sound quality.
The Internet radio is fantastic, although you won't know what the bitrate is, you can tell by the quality of sound to judge which internet channels you want to bookmark. Since this unit has built in ram to buffer incoming channels you can kind of judge the bitrate by he amount of time the buffer runs before music starts. All you need for Internet radio is a highspeed connection. No PC required. And the choice of stations is endless. I estimate over 2000 so far, thousands more if you count podcasts. You can record these sources on an MD but you loose all titles. Speaking of titles they are all clearly displayed on the unit, but to manuever through the directories you will need your TV as a monitor, once you get where you want to be turn off the monitor if you want. Internet radio worked out of the box, my router allowed it to connect and instantly started streaming. The USB thumb drive I store music on to play in my NDS instantly worked after being plugged in the USB port on the units front. I found the quality to be excellent, especially if you use the "enhanced 6 channel". It expands the compressed files and gives you more of the original sound. Now as for the PC media streaming, that is another matter. That took a while to get it to work. But once I had it up and running it works great. The sound from DVD and CD sources will knock you out if you have good speakers. And the sound modeling programs are enough to keep you entralled before you want to customize them. Now for my special tips:

[...]

The next tip for better sound and more efficient driving by the amp section. This tip is in the instructions but easy to miss, If you are using A and B front speakers. Set the speaker ohm requirement to 6 ohms. This will really make your front speakers sing.

Take the time to tweak the sound level outputs and input level trims, this will make your listening time more enjoyable.
For the money you cannot beat this for the sound quality and the features. It also uses a lot less electricity than my other 350 watt amp. The unit will use 55 watts while blasting out decent sound levels. I like the XM radio tuner and will use it but not as much since the internet radio is free. I also do not have an ipod since I use my NDS for portable media and games. So I cannot speak to the ipod functions.
I hope this has helped some that may have been put off by other reviews.

I love the idea that you can hook this up to your wireless home network and access music stored on your computers. I have a D-Link HDD storage unit connected directly to my wireless router and thats where i store all my music and movies. I wanted some way to have a home theater unlock all the music whithought having to dedicate a computer to this. The yamaha amplifier allows you to do this - but you still need a computer to be running a media server software so it can access this. I wish the amplifier could scan hard drives directly and be able to play them directly even when the media server is not up and running. I have a pretty large collection - about 7000 songs and the amplifier does have a problem digesting all of this and showing that in the browser, i think is the biggest thing they should work upon.
Other than that the connections the amplifier has are great. i have always been a fan of yamaha amps and this one has only helped strengthen that.

I was looking for a receiver that had the capability to play music files off of an external hard drive. This receiver can do that and so much more. I haven't played with it much, but have connected it to my hard drive and works great. Loads songs faster than playing from my PC. I also have connected the receiver to my home network and have been able to play songs from my PC as well as listen to Internet radio stations!! The unit is cheap because of the lack of an HDMI input/output, but I didn't need one. This receiver has all the capability I need as well as flexibility. I do agree that it was a bit difficult to set-up. But, once I figured out how to use the OSD (On Screen Display), which displays menus on a monitor/TV, it was fairly simple as long as you have your network working properly.

The unit sounds very good, was easy to set up, and lived up to my expectations. The 6.1 Stereo works perfectly in my small'ish living room. The only problem is Yamaha could have spent a little more time in refining the Internet menus, a little difficult to quickly make selections.

My options included Denon, HK and this Yamaha in the $300-$400 range. It was not easy to decide and I did quite a lot of research before I bought this unit. So far I am very happy with my decision. IMHO this Yamaha has all the qualities of the good receiver:

1. Good DSP and decoder - both Dolby digital and DTS decoders has almost perfect channel separation and balance and the 192/24 bit DSP is very good. This means that sound field in movies is very detailed. Also I liked yamaha's Compressed Music Enhancer modes.

2. Good amp - don't compare this yamaha's 90W (DIN) per channel with 100W power of other amps. It's at least 2 times more powerful then my old Sony 90W per channel receiver (and by the way it's about 3 times heavier). The sound is detailed and balanced - I can finally listen to the U2 "Achtung Baby" album that sounded too sharp on the old Sony. Also the "Night" modes are very valuable as we often have time to watch movies only after kids are in bed...

3. Nice features and decent connectivity - Internet radio kicked in as soon as I plugged receiver into my network router. There are so many stations but the sound quality is mostly bad (with few exceptions). Then it took about an hour to figure out how to share the music from the Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Vista PC but at the end the sound quality is fantastic even compared to my JBL pc speaker system. (Btw it worked without any firmware upgrade.) I didn't yet try the XM radio and have no plans to buy a IPod doc. As for HDMI, I had a horrible experience with this interface, so no plans to use anything but component for video switching.

So you can tell my first impression is very good. Good luck in your quest for a perfect receiver. ;-)

The amp does what it advertises and well. Some people complain about certain features missing, etc, but before purchasing, you should have done research to know what this model has and does not have. Overall it works great! It is not a $2,000 receiver, so don't compare it to one. I have not had any issues with it at all. I use it in my master-bedroom, paired with in-ceiling Boston Acoustic speakers and Yamaha Center channel speaker and Yamaha sub-woofer. All connected to a Samsung 50" Plasma. Picture and Sound are amazing when watching Blu-ray movies and HD broadcasts. I can't complain for the features and price.

I'm very pleased with the purchase of this receiver. Great sound, decent remote and easy navigation. Drawbacks are no HDMI connectors and a text-based gui for connecting to your home network and listening to MP3's.

I bought this Receiver to replace an older Harmon Kardon unit. Found it on a special sale and could not let it go. I have been using it for a few weeks now. It has loads of features, some of which I have yet to use. BUT it's number one benefit is the crystal clear sound at all power levels.