Re: New AV amp
Posted: Sat Oct 05, 2019 5:51 pm
My final report on the Yamaha:
It's an excellent piece of kit, absolutely brilliant in fact, given the price. I still haven't explored everything it can do but I'm incredibly pleased with what it's doing so far. With the addition of the AudioQuest HDMI leads (not to mention the USB and the optical leads), the picture is pin-sharp and the sound is good too, but with a little room for (achievable, I believe) improvement. I need to explore the sound settings more fully.
I was watching England Ladies play Brazil at footy earlier, and the best way I can describe the picture is: You know when you go into a shop (Remember those?) and all of the TVs on display are showing special content and are switched to a special "display" mode to make them look their absolute best? That's what it looks like (dependant what it's being fed, obviously) all of the time now. I've currently got it set it to upsample 1080p to 4K, and I have no intention of changing that. It works. The footy, at the moment, has that "3D-look" quality about it.
I'm still looking for the very last piece of the jigsaw which is a 1m, or even better a 1.5m, AudioQuest Cinnamon (or better) HDMI lead, to replace the QED Performance HDMI-P lead I'm using at the moment. I'm happy to wait until a "used bargain" pops up for that though. I don't even know if it will make a huge improvement, but it will mean that the cables are all of uniform quality. Who knows, maybe there's some sort of magical cumulative effect? Yeah. No.
Overall I'm extremely happy and although I've ended up spending over half as much again on cables as I spent on the amp itself that would appear to have been a worthwhile experiment too.
I would definitely recommend the Yamaha RX-V485 for a small 5.1 home AV setup.
It's an excellent piece of kit, absolutely brilliant in fact, given the price. I still haven't explored everything it can do but I'm incredibly pleased with what it's doing so far. With the addition of the AudioQuest HDMI leads (not to mention the USB and the optical leads), the picture is pin-sharp and the sound is good too, but with a little room for (achievable, I believe) improvement. I need to explore the sound settings more fully.
I was watching England Ladies play Brazil at footy earlier, and the best way I can describe the picture is: You know when you go into a shop (Remember those?) and all of the TVs on display are showing special content and are switched to a special "display" mode to make them look their absolute best? That's what it looks like (dependant what it's being fed, obviously) all of the time now. I've currently got it set it to upsample 1080p to 4K, and I have no intention of changing that. It works. The footy, at the moment, has that "3D-look" quality about it.
I'm still looking for the very last piece of the jigsaw which is a 1m, or even better a 1.5m, AudioQuest Cinnamon (or better) HDMI lead, to replace the QED Performance HDMI-P lead I'm using at the moment. I'm happy to wait until a "used bargain" pops up for that though. I don't even know if it will make a huge improvement, but it will mean that the cables are all of uniform quality. Who knows, maybe there's some sort of magical cumulative effect? Yeah. No.
Overall I'm extremely happy and although I've ended up spending over half as much again on cables as I spent on the amp itself that would appear to have been a worthwhile experiment too.
I would definitely recommend the Yamaha RX-V485 for a small 5.1 home AV setup.