The Official Yamaha RX V663 Owners Thread

[derzauberer]

Originally Posted by DrMARK

Very interesting thread on the new Yamaha Aventage Receivers!

I recently purchased the Yamaha RX-A800 to replace my Yamaha RX-V1. Being lightweight at 25 pounds, I am running the RX-A800 as a pre/pro and use a SONY TA-N9000ES 5-channel power amplifier to drive my 5 Paradigm speakers. However, I let the RX-A800 built-in amps drive my height speakers as well as my center back surround speaker. And I love the result. I can't believe that for $308 (the price I paid Amazon for a brand-new RX-A800 last October 2011), my audio system which is now able to decode and playback DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD, is back in the big league.

I have a question though. Whenever I play a blu-ray disc with a DTS-HD MA and choose Straight/Decoder Off, the front panel display shows DTS-HD MSTR. But, when I engage the receiver's DSP (eg, Spectacle, Adventure, etc.) which activates the presence/height or surround back channels, the front panel display only shows DTS. Does this mean, the RX-A800 is playing back the legacy or lossy DTS instead of the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio?

BTW, this is not the case with Dolby TrueHD. The front panel display shows Dolby TrueHD, whether I choose Straight or any DSP mode (eg, Spectacle, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Drama, etc). Please advise. Thank you.

DrMark:

This thread has long been dead, but interestingly enough though, I brought an RX-A800 a couple of years ago to replace my old out of date RX-V663. I bought my RX-A800 around the same time as you did. It actually cost me $200 less than my V663 did back in 2008.

Now to your question, that's right, if you have DTS-HD MA 5.1 or Dolby TrueHD 5.1 you can't get lossless 7.1 from DSP. You can't get lossless decoding from channels that weren't there to begin with. Once you engage DSP, you can't expect the back surround channels to be losslessly decoded since the original lossless tracks didn't include back surrounds or height speaker channels. Furthermore, since DSP is adding or even perhaps taking away sound that was losslessly decoded from the original lossess codec, it isn't by definition lossless sound any more. It has been altered. Lossless means that the sound is bit for bit identical to the original. All the receiver is telling you is that the input or source was lossless Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA. That's it.

So, you have to decide what 's best for you: the way the movie was intended to be heard or the way you would rather hear it.