Yamaha RX-V863 AV Receiver

The Consumer Electronics Association recently kicked off a �Convert Your Mom� campaign to advance the transition to digital television. One thing your mom will probably never want is a surround receiver. Sure, no home theater buff in her right mind would relegate audio functions to TV speakers. But, although the receiver is the nerve center for many systems, it�s also a stumbling block to many potential users. Receivers just do too many good things entailing setup and adjustment hassles along the way. Make them simpler, and you lose capabilities.

Make them full featured, and you get an instruction manual that�s like War and Peace (minus the literary merit). Manufacturers like Yamaha, however, are doing the best they can to make the surround receiver�s cornucopia of features comprehensible and accessible to the user.

The RX-V863, like most receivers nowadays, includes automatic setup and room equalization and the latest version is not only faster to set up, at less than three minutes, but it also provides up to six settings, so a large family watching a movie needn�t use the same settings as a lone kid using a video game.

Yamaha also provides what it calls scene templates, which allow you to further adjust the receiver for different applications.

Yes, this is a feature laden product. A proprietary jack connects either an iPod dock, the YDS-10, or a Bluetooth adapter, the YBA-10. Via the latter, the receiver can connect wirelessly to a Bluetooth cell phone, music player, or PC. Both adapters are optional. Unfortunately, you can�t connect both at once. For radio, this receiver is a quadruple threat with Sirius, XM, the new over the air HD Radio, and old-style AM/FM. And it�s got the full complement of next gen surround decoding, including Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio, and DTS-HD Master Audio (as well as multichannel PCM).

Make the Scene
What does Yamaha hope to accomplish with the scene template controls? Any time you select an input on a receiver, it remembers your previous soundfield selection. That�s convenient if you use each input in the same manner every time. But what if you use a single source component for different purposes for instance, a DVD player for either DVDs or CDs? In those situations, the scene templates allow further refinements.

There are four scene buttons on both the front panel and the remote. As shipped, the receiver labels them DVD Viewing, Disc Listening, TV Viewing, and Radio Listening. You can change these to other preloaded selections, a total of 19, from the scene template library. You can also create your own scenes, for one time or permanent use, with name, input, and soundfield mode.