My Big Fat Review
Why Did I Wait So Long?!?
I have a lot of cool components and gadgets for my Home Theater setup, but the Yamaha RX-V2700 is the essential heart of the whole deal. I have to say I didn't realize how bad it was, but in retrospect I was suffering with my old RCA RT2300R. My V2700 arrived packaged very poorly, I'm actually surprised it survived the trip. One of the dangers of buying from some obscure website to save a buck(It was not Amazon). Fortunately the only damage was on the positive connection for front left channel, it won't screw all the way down. Setup was fairly easy if you consider all the connections on the back panel. Setup includes a mic that you run to the center of where you'd normally sit, at ear height, then through the Yamaha GUI the receiver calibrates the speakers for you and it does a great job of it too. Beyond the usual speaker hook ups there are 40 plus additional hook ups for all your video/audio ins and outs. I'm only running a 5.1 setup, but the V2700 handles 7.1 if you have the room for 10 speakers. My current setup of components is an Old Xbox (using component video and optical toslink audio), a Xbox 360 (ditto hook ups), a PSP slim (using component video and rca for audio), a Sony CDPCX455 400 disc CD changer (optical toslink audio) and my Media PC (optical toslink for audio, video for this runs directly to my Optoma EP 727 via Dual DVI) . The Yamaha also comes with 4 HDMI hook ups. Eventually I will hook up my 360 via HDMI, but unfortunately this my only HDMI device. I'm also outing an optical signal via toslink back into my Media PC (all for show on my Soundgraph iMON Ultra Bay equlizer). I have a component video out to my Optoma EP 727 from the Yamaha which is great, because before hand I had a switcher to handle my PSP, Xbox and Xbox 360. All these things are great and have really simplified my setup, but the real deal is the sound. The Yamaha RX-V2700 running through my Monitor Audio GS60's has a natural, pure and gorgeous sound. From my CD player or playing FLAC files from the Media PC the sound is simply amazing. For MP3's the Yamaha has a 2 channel or 7 channel enhancer to fill in the lost sound you get with MP3 compression. Usually features like that don't make a difference, but the improvement is actually quite noticeable on the Yamaha. Still I recommend using CD's or FLAC's for your music listening. As far as movies go I've only watched the Big Lebowski so far in surround sound and it was amazing. This is a movie I have seen probably 5 or 6 times and it is a great experience to sit through it again and here all the things I had missed before. I've yet to play any games on my 360 through the RX-V2700 yet, but I'm sure I'll be blown away, especially when I get the HDMI. Finally take into consideration I am running Boston CR6's for my surround and a Definitive Tech Mythos One as a center, all great speakers but it's always a loss when you mix brands and ohms. Yet, in my opinion, it hasn't hampered the RX-V2700 at kicking butt all around. I'll be sure to update this review when I get the HDMI, along with other details that I come across in time. So far I am ecstatic about the Yamaha RX-V2700 an amazing piece of equipment for the price, no doubt.
Update! 4/8/9 got around to hooking up my ethernet to the receiver and I just have to say fantastic. 4,000 plus internet radio stations. Of course quality varies, but this is a great feature for listening to some international radio or what have you and with the MP3 enhancer feature built into the Yamaha most of them sound pretty good.