Yamaha’s premium home theatre receiver line – the Aventage range – is now up to Series V. Of the five models in the range, the Yamaha Aventage RX-A850 is one up from the entry level unit, and the most economical one to offer Dolby Atmos decoding.

What is it?

The RX-A850 is a seven channel home theatre receiver with, roughly, 100W per channel available (more on that shortly). It is highly networkable, with excellent support for digital audio formats. Including, as indicated, Dolby Atmos. Unlike higher Yamaha models, it will not support the DTS equivalent, DTS:X, so if and when Blu-ray discs bearing that format appear, they will play in the conventional 7.1 channels.

There are a generous eight HDMI inputs, one on the front panel. Three of them support the new digital protection standard, HDCP 2.2, so when UHD Blu-ray appears there should be no compatibility problems. Likewise both of the two HDMI outputs support HDCP 2.2.

One of the HDMI inputs is on the front panel. In recent years this one has typically supported MHL, but that has now been dropped. That seems appropriate given that MHL seems doomed by its terrible roll-out (incompatible standards and no availability of MHL cables).

There are also analogue audio and video inputs, plus one for moving magnet level phono. The built-in radio tuner supports AM and FM, but not DAB+. It has built in network support, along with WiFi and built in Bluetooth.

If at some point you decide that you need a performance boost, the receiver provides seven channels of preamplifier outputs so you can add external power amps.

There are nine sets of speaker terminals for the seven amps, so a couple of different configurations can be maintained and switched between. In addition to regular 7.1 channel sound, two can be redeployed to bi-amp the front speakers, drive a second zone, or drive ’Front Presence’ speakers, or height ones for Dolby Atmos. More on this shortly.

In recent years Yamaha has offered only limited low impedance loudspeaker support on its receivers – even its very expensive ones. This one is no different. With the default settings all speakers must have nominal impedances of at least 8Ω. If any of the speakers is less, then a setting must be adjusted on the unit. But all but the front left and right channels still must be at least 6Ω. Only those two channels are specified for 4Ω loudspeakers.

This difference is reflected in the specifications, in which the front stereo channel outputs are clearly specified at 100W across the full audio bandwidth with just 0.06% total harmonic distortion, while the other channels are only vaguely specified.

I have no doubt that this receiver will happily drive four ohm loudspeakers all around, but should something go wrong there could very well be warranty issues.

I hate saying that, because in just about every other respect Yamaha receivers come closest to my idea of the perfect home theatre receiver.

Setting Up

The receiver starts up by offering you the chance to connect it to the network. I took the easy option and followed the easy setup option, which involves taking an iOS device, finding the receiver’s code in the WiFi selection panel of the device (actually, it was in a section for setting up AirPlay speakers), selecting it and waiting a few seconds. The iPad’s WiFi settings transferred to the receiver wirelessly, so network connection was completed in seconds.

Do note, the receiver only works on the 2.4GHz band, so make sure your iOS device is connected to a 2.4GHz access point, not a 5GHz one. The 802.11 b/g/n standards are supported

That was it as far start-up wizards go. The next step is to go to the Setup menu, choose Speaker and run Auto Setup. That deploys Yamaha’s proprietary YMAO speaker optimisation process which sets speaker distances, sizes and determines settings for its parametric equaliser. If you want to use Dolby Atmos and Dolby Surround processing to full effect, than you’ll need some form of height speakers. The unit offers three options: speakers placed in the Front Presence area (up high on the front wall, like Yamaha’s traditional Presence speakers), as a pair of ceiling speakers, or as a pair of Atmos-enabled speakers sitting on or as part of the front stereo pair. In general, I’d recommend ceiling as the first choice for physical speakers, then Atmos-enabled, then Front Presence. Make the setting to match the speakers.

YPAO works at least as well as any in the business. And I’m happy to note that after years of my complaints (and presumably others), this model now allows the setting of separate crossover frequencies for ‘Small’ speakers. Previous models at this level required the same setting for all small speakers, which could lead to unfortunate compromises. The crossover of each speaker pair can be set to one of nine frequencies between 40 and 200 hertz, thus catering even for very small satellites.

Bluetooth worked fairly well. The connection is done in the usual way: set the receiver to Bluetooth and then search for it with your Bluetooth enabled music player.

You need to disconnect the player, switch the receiver to another input and back again, in order to pair a new device. Strictly one at a time.

The Bluetooth audio support includes the standard SBC Codec, and the rarely offered AAC one, but not aptX. That means that you’re likely to get higher quality Bluetooth sound from Apple iOS devices rather than Android ones.

Performance

I’ve become bit of a Dolby Atmos/Surround snob. While a purist at heart, I’ve become convinced that even in the absence of specifically programmed Atmos content, the new version of Dolby Surround does a superb job of identifying content that should be overhead and places it there. If you have speakers up there, that is.

In the home context, Dolby Atmos/Surround support runs to a maximum of 3/4/4.1 channels. That is, three front speakers/four surround and surround rear speakers/four overhead speakers plus LFE. This receiver has the minimum Atmos offering: 3/2/2.1, ie. standard 5.1 plus two overhead speakers.

Snob or not, I have to admit that this arrangement achieves at least 90 per cent of the effect of the 3/2/4.1 system I’ve been using for several months. Four overhead speakers allows the height field to be pulled a touch further to the rear, but that’s about it for major differences.

So the net result with movie sound was extremely strong, with plenty of power for high volume levels, superb location of sound in half a sphere running overhead. Just stick with speakers within the receiver’s specified requirements.

The unit includes video upscaling, or it can pass the video through without altering it. In the latter case, the unit’s own menus are overlaid on the video, so the On Screen Menu and the Option Menu pop up instantly when required. If rescaling, though, the unit switches back to pass through mode before it will display those menus.

The scaling can go up to 4K, indeed 2160p50/60 if your TV does. However I thought the picture a little soft in this mode. The results were sharper with it scaling SD material up to 1080p and then letting my LG UHD TV do the last bit. The progressive scan conversion from the 576i50 standard used on most Australian DVDs and on SDTV was adequate, but too often tricked into the wrong mode, resulting in such artefacts as visible moiré patterns on closely space lines.

You can play lots of different varieties of music from USB or streamed over the network. I checked out the former to make sure it worked, and did most of my music listening with the latter. It played all my MP3, WAV, AAC, ALAC (Apple Lossless) and FLAC files perfectly. It was also supposed to stream DSD, and indeed played this properly from USB, but reported that it was ‘Unable to play’ any of them. Yamaha said that it should be okay with these files. It whipped up a test firmware update which resolved the problem, which apparently was an incompatibility with my server. The next official firmware should include this.

One thing that remains a limitation is that streaming (and USB) only supports stereo files. I’d criticise this receiver for not supporting multichannel FLAC, except that none of others do, other than Sony.

Musically it was great. It handled even my 192kHz, 24 bit FLAC tracks, fed via the WiFi connection.

And what made it particularly good was the truly excellent Yamaha AV Controller app, available for both iOS and Android. This was utterly reliable and very fast in operation. It was simple to dial up the music I wanted from my network attached storage and get it going.

But of course, you can use other apps to drive music to it, for the receiver is both a DLNA player and a renderer. Either way, it supports gapless music playback, so there are no interruptions. The receiver also supports Spotify Connect (you need a premium Spotify subscription for this), Pandora, and Apple’s AirPlay. The nice thing about all of these was that they connected fast and reliably, making them a pleasure to use.

MusicCast

Just as I completed this review Yamaha released its new multi-room system, reusing what must be a very valuable name that it used back in the early 2000s: MusicCast. In addition to a number of specific products, Yamaha’s latest generation network-capable home theatre receivers also support this, including, of course, the Aventage RX-A850.

So I switched on the receiver and pressed the On-Screen key to see if the new firmware required for this was available. Yes it was. I accepted the offer of installation and after about ten minutes the receiver was ready with new firmware number 1.54. While that was happening I downloaded the new MusicCast app to my iPad Mini.

The app talks you through the connection process, but gives insufficient information. So does the MusicCast setup sheet. Both require you to press the ‘Connect’ button on the Yamaha device for three seconds. What they didn’t mention was that on receivers, the ‘Connect’ button is a secondary function of the ‘Straight’ button (that switches off the various DSP modes). I eventually stumbled across it (‘Connect’ does appear in parentheses under the button, so I suppose I should have read the front panel more closely).

That problem solved, it worked brilliantly. I held down the button for three seconds, ‘Connect’ came up on the unit’s display, I hit ‘Next’ in the app, and within a couple of seconds the two had completed the connection. A couple of steps to tidy things up, guided by the app, and I was able to send music to it. We will look in more detail at MusicCast when some more of the products are available.

Conclusion

The Yamaha Aventage RX-A850 is a very nice home theatre receiver, with most of the full Dolby Atmos capabilities, very good home theatre performance, and excellent network music handling. However, if you already have a full set of four ohm loudspeakers, you may want to look elsewhere.