I was looking to update a previous Yamaha receiver with one that has support for HDMI and Dolby True HD/DTS Master sound formats. With a nice coupon code, I was able to purchase for under $1k from 6th Ave Electronics. Here are my thoughts:
First of all, the sound is terrific. I have a small place, and was afraid the amp would overpower the room, but it has a beautiful resonance whether you're listening to music at low levels, or cranking it. For video acoustics, I popped in The Dark Knight. The Dolby True HD soundtrack was incredible! No complaints.
I'm also not a hardcore configuration guy (I tried the microphone setup on my previous unit, and wound up manually tweaking it anyway), but I must say, it's not too difficult to manually configure and setup this unit to your liking. The major adjustments I made were to adjust the individual speaker levels and speaker distances from the receiver. No problems here.
And now for the bad. In a nutshell, I've abandoned using this receiver as a video device. The recommended hookup is to run all your components through the receiver via HDMI connections, and then one HDMI from the receiver to your TV. There are two major design flaws with hooking the receiver up this way.
Call me crazy, but I like the choice of playing sound through either my receiver, or the TV (i.e. for late night listening). There is an option to allow sound through both the receiver and TV simultaneously, but here's the caveat. You will only get stereo sound to both!! I've noticed this on blu ray as well as cable. My guess is, since my TV won't be able to accept a "digital" sound signal, the receiver "dumbs down" the audio to the lowest level that both can accept (i.e. stereo). Thus, no 5.1+ surround formats to the Yamaha if you'd like to have sound output to your TV. The way around this (which i've reconfigured my stereo to handle) is to run all HDMI/video inputs directly to your TV, while outputting just the audio to the receiver via optical cables from your components. However, if you configure this way, the HD sound formats mentioned above (Dolby HD/DTS Master) are disabled, as they can only be carried by direct HDMI cables to the receiver. What a bummer...
Second, and perhaps more annoyingly, the receiver, which is supposed to have on screen display (OSD), does not show volume control on-screen when you adjust the volume! If you're listening to the radio or playing your IPOD it will, but not while adjusting volume for video sources. Yamaha's consolation for this is to show a generic crappy looking volume bar on the unit itself. Problem is, other than "blocks" to show what volume you're at, it's nearly impossible to see the actual decibel level on the unit unless you're two feet in front of it, because it's displayed in tiny font in the upper right corner of the receiver. I'm aware that the step-up RX-V3900 solves this problem (with a much nicer OSD and volume display for video), but seriously, for a receiver that retails at $1,400, this is beyond ridiculous.
While these issues have frustrated me a bit, I still have to give this unit props for its excellent sound, which is a bargain if you can find it for under a grand. However, the amateurish looking OSD, and related issues render it frustrating to use the Yamaha as your video centerpiece. For consumers looking for an all-in-one video audio solution, Yamaha got it half right.