Yamaha RX-A3000 7.1-Channel Audio/Video Receiver (Black) Review

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(More customer reviews)My interest in Home Media originates from a musical background as a musician and avid listener.
The RX-A3000 is my 6th Yamaha DSP A/V receiver since my first (DSP-E300) in 1990--having owned other A/V amps including the first ever Dolby Digital (AC3) compatible (Pioneer). Yamaha's major feature to me is the natural sound on all their DSP SoundFields. Most every other receiver listened to does Dolby and DTS movie surround sound decoding just fine, but if you are into listening to 2 channel music processed to sound like different venues such as The Roxy, The Bottom Line, various concert halls in Europe etc. nobody does it better than Yamaha. Other receivers have rather phony sounding processing using their proprietary chips.
I think the key to the Yamaha is the original research and recording done back when they designed their first DSP unit the DSP-1 in 1986 or so. As a matter of fact, I liked the processing on my Yamaha DSP E-300 so much that I daisy chained it to later more state of the art A/V amps so that I could use it for music listening. Now with the RX-A3000 it has just about the same amount of concert venues as the E-300, plus a bunch of DSP Cinema Modes as well.
Yamaha makes the optimization of your listening environment quite easy with their YPAO setup. It goes through a checklist of speaker connections and phase of each speaker. Then it sends out tones which are captured by a microphone to analyze the room acoustics and sets a variety of parameters, such as the speaker size, the distance of the speakers and even the sound pressure level. It also allows for what I'd call a "blended" setup whereby measurements can be taken and stored from more than one listening position so that the end result is not tailored to just one sweet spot in the room.
The unit can be expanded to 11.2 channels with external amps, but an out of the box 7.2 setup is more than adequate for me (the RX-A3000 has outputs for 2 subwoofers which can be configured for Front/Rear, Front Mono, or Front Stereo).
Since this is a Video as well as Audio device, it must be noted that there are no fewer than 8 (7 + 1 in front) HDMI 3D compatible inputs and 2 HDMI outs. A new OSD GUI can now overlay on HD sources, and after a little bit of practice becomes very intuitive and useful.
The RX-V3000 has a new HQV Vida high-class video chipset, which has a myriad of adjustments if you want to tweak the picture (potentially more useful for SD DVD and analog video) or just let the signal pass through. I let the Yamaha upscale to 1080p, TiVo OTA/Netflix, SD DVDs, AppleTV, as well as OTA TV with stunning results. The receiver is the first piece of equipment in my eventual upgrade to full 3D, but in the interim, 2D Blu-ray, and HD DVD are an awesome experience due to its sound and state of the art circuitry.
Indeed, the physical chassis has been beefed up in this series featuring a 5th foot for stability and vibration control, and H-shaped cross member frame with double bottom construction. With all its improvements Yamaha has seen fit to extend the OEM warranty from 2 to 3 years.
The Yamaha iPod dock I've been using since the days of the RX-V2700 is compatible and the OSD has been improved greatly making it more of a pleasure to use compared to the old interface. The main improvement for me is the ability to scroll 10 pages at a time to find music, but it's too bad there's still no alpha/numeric search because I have over 13,000 songs.
The unit can be controlled with an iPhone app, in addition to a regular web browser when the Yamaha is part of your LAN. And speaking of control, the remote is not exactly the best around with some of the more used buttons (for me) being buried under a hinged door. But if you happen to prefer a universal remote (my choice is the Logitech Harmony One), that's all moot. Yamaha is very good at disseminating their remote codes both the default and extended which have a lot of discrete ones not on the OEM remote (e.g. accessing a particular Classical Hall directly instead of toggling though the choices etc.).
So if you're looking for an extremely versatile piece of equipment to be the heart and soul of your video experience, which can also bring immense musical enjoyment, I can't recommend this unit more highly.

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