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Reviews (1)
18 Jul, 2018
Great features for the price
Pros:
Lots of ports
Wireless connectivity
Good feature set
Clean look
Nice remote
Good price
Cons:
Occasionally quirky UI
Lazy “no signal” screen
Poor screensaver design
Low-res self-generated screens
Keep in mind:
Hybrid speaker wire plugs are awkward to connect bare wire to; banana plugs recommended
Further thoughts:
I got this when it was on sale for $230. With an in-app coupon, I paid a little under $200 for this. At that price, I was looking at considerably less feature-rich receivers. While I only have a 5.1, 1080p system, it is nice to have room to expand up to 7.2 or 5.2.2, 4K, HDR, and Dolby Atmos.
In my opinion, both the remote and front of the receiver strike a good balance between form and function. Both look pretty clean but have enough controls to easily control the receiver. I would kind of like if there was a way to adjust the brightness of the built-in display from the remote, but since it remembers the last brightness setting between power cycles, it is hardly a noticeable omission.
I don’t have any in-depth thoughts about sound quality, as I don’t have much experience with other A/V receivers and my speakers are all pretty low-end. But it all sounds pretty good to my ears. The automatic calibration for my system gave it too much bass and not enough treble, but it was easy enough to adjust those levels in the Quick Menu.
Speaking of, the Quick Menu is quite handy. It allows you to tweak the sound without actually interrupting the movie or game that you’re currently viewing. However, the weird thing is that while the quick menu will overlay itself on whatever input you’re currently viewing *unless* that input is a built-in one, like AirPlay or Bluetooth. If you open the quick menu while playing from such an input, it will stop displaying that, switch to the generic all-blue “no signal” screen, then overlay the quick menu over a static blue background. Audio will continue to play through this whole process, so it’s not really that bad, it’s just a bit perplexing how it’s able to project the quick menu over any input except its own.
I also think they could have done better on the “no signal” screen. While it hardly makes any difference anyway, I would have preferred a black screen with “no signal” displayed in the center. A static all-blue screen just seems lazy. More important, however, is the lazy screensaver which activates on the aforementioned built-in inputs only (thankfully). It has a static set of images that look fine, but they fade in and out extremely slowly such that each “step” in the fade in/out is painfully obvious. The screen saver’s poor design is further reinforced by the fact that it will activate even while music is playing through AirPlay or Bluetooth. This is rather annoying if you spend more than a few minutes listening to music and want to be able to quickly see what is currently playing. For these aforementioned reasons, I would recommend completely disabling the screen saver feature.
Another weird thing is that even though I have it hooked up to a 1080p TV, and it supports up to 4K resolution in/out, its built-in functions only display at 720p resolution. In other words, any time you go in to the full Settings section, or display the currently playing track through its built-in AirPlay or Bluetooth input, it will only send a 720p signal. Of course, having a high-res Now Playing or Settings screen isn’t nearly as critical as having a high-res signal from your Blu-Ray player, but it’s still weird to see such a low-res screen on a 4K receiver.
That said, it’s one of the more affordable 4K receivers out there, and with 6 HDMI inputs and built-in Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Bluetooth connectivity, I’d say it’s a pretty good receiver given the price.
As briefly mentioned above, the terminals for the speakers all use a screw-in design that will accept either bare wire or banana plugs. However, I know from experience that having them so close together makes it quite a pain to get bare wire in there. For that reason, I’d consider getting banana plugs to attach to the receiver end of all your speaker wires. However, the banana plugs I got were quite a pain to attach, so you’ll need to determine if you’d prefer the one-time hassle of banana plugs or repeated hassle every time you need to re-attach your speaker wire to the receiver.