Yamaha HTR-5440: A Home Theater Bargain
Written: Oct 15 '01 (Updated Oct 16 '01)
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Pros: Sounds great, looks good, reasonably priced, Yamaha reputation
Cons: Annoying menu system
The Bottom Line: This is an excellent receiver for anyone looking for great performance and name brand reliability on a budget.
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| Ahab1973's Full Review: Yamaha HTR-5440 5.1 Channels Receiver |
A few months ago, I began to notice that the Home theater receiver that I had originally chosen wasn’t delivering the level of performance that I felt I needed. My previous receiver was a lower end Aiwa with Dolby Digital decoding. While I was reasonably satisfied with it for the price (About $170), I noticed that I often had trouble hearing distinct dialog in the center channel. For a while, I thought this was due to the way certain movies were recorded. Well, some of it was. I also began to encounter more and more DVDs encoded with both Dolby Digital and DTS. Along with this, I was never very satisfied with the generic look and feel of the Aiwa remote control.
With all of these issues in mind, I began to do a little research on various receivers. I concluded that I needed something with a decent amount of power, more features, a better remote and all at a price that was well within my budget. Like many novice home theater enthusiasts, I looked first at what Sony had to offer. They all had lots of features, more than adequate power and very reasonable prices. However, upon doing some research on the net, I kept hearing at least some negative reviews of Sony receivers. The only company that most people had nothing but good things to say about was Yamaha. Now Yamaha receivers are a little more expensive than your run of the mill lower end receivers. This is one reason why I held out and read reviews on many others first. I looked at Denon, Onkyo and a couple of other highly regarded name brands. Too expensive for my budget. After all, the combined price of all of my speakers is around $500. I didn’t feel like I should go overboard with a very expensive receiver. At the same time, I wanted something that would have some room for growth if I chose to upgrade my speakers in the future.
I finally began seriously looking at Yamaha. The model I finally selected was the HTR-5440. At $299 the price was right, although quite a bit higher than a similarly equipped Sony or Pioneer. I have heard nothing but praise for Yamaha’s “Natural Sound” receivers” so I was pretty excited to get it home and try it out. Upon connecting it, I first tried out a few music CDs. Now a lot of Audio enthusiasts actually prize receivers that have more of a flat sound. I’m a little different. While I don’t like audio equipment that overly emphasizes bass or treble, I do prefer both to be slightly emphasized. With this line of receivers, there is really no way of doing that other than two tone controls. One for bass and the other for treble. Even after tweaking both controls, the sound is still decidedly flat. But not really in a bad way. It does take time to get used to it if you’re used to listening to music on audio equipment with a lot of different EQ presets and bass boost. I’ve grown accustomed to it though and it doesn’t bother me. Vocals and midrange are definitely clearer than on equipment with a lot of artificial enhancement settings.
After owning and listening to this receiver for a couple of months, listening to a wide variety of music and DVDs, I can’t really find too many things that I don’t like about it. But there are a few. I’ll get into those in a moment. The universal multibrand remote control for this receiver is actually pretty nice and well laid out. It's a bit longer and more narrow than most remotes. There are two sets of directional arrow keys on the lower half of it. The one at the very bottom are for navigating the menus and making selections, while the upper one is for the volume etc. The remote can be programmed to control a variety of different equipment, including DVD/LD, VCRs and CD players.
One of the things I really don’t really care much for about this receiver is the menu system. It’s a little more complex than it needs to be and it takes a while to get used to it. Using the keys to navigate through the menus and make your selections is a little annoying. If you screw up and pass the item you’re trying to adjust, you usually have to scroll through all the others just to get back to it again. I would have to say that the menu system is, at best counter-intuitive. And it can be downright maddening to attempt to make adjustments in the dark. The remote is not backlit (At this price you wouldn’t expect it to be though). I have a particular distaste for the way that the adjustments for Dolby Digital, DTS and the subwoofer are laid out. All of the adjustments you could want to make are there but it will take some time to get used to the way Yamaha has provided you of doing it. It can be very frustrating to fiddle endlessly with the menu when you’re trying to enjoy a movie and you want to do something as simple as reducing the output level to the subwoofer.
Inputs- The Yamaha has a good variety of inputs. There are two optical and one coaxial digital audio inputs. There are also several video inputs so that you can use the receiver as a video selector. I don’t really need this feature though because my TV has enough inputs for all of my AV equipment. Hooking everything up is easy enough (provided you’re used to doing this sort of thing). All those inputs and outputs can look pretty intimidating if you’re a little electronically challenged but it’s actually pretty straightforward if you follow the instructions.
Speaking of the owner’s manual, this one actually does a fairly poor job of clearly explaining the use of the menu system and some other key functions. Some features are vaguely described and left to the user to figure out just what the feature is for.
In operation, once you have all of the settings correctly adjusted, this receiver decodes Dolby Digital and DTS very well. It will automatically detect and decode which ever format the disc is encoded with (Something my last receiver didn’t always do properly). The surround sound comes through loud, clear and distinct. Mostly gone are my problems with dialog. There are a few scenes in Saving Private Ryan where the voices are barely audible unless you crank the volume up. However, this particular movie had the same problem on my other receiver.
The power on this receiver is listed as appx 70 watts per channel to all five channels. This conflicts slightly with the 65 WPC listing here on Epinions, but I tend to lean toward what the owner’s manual says. This doesn’t sound like much power but believe me, it’s very effective. Unless you want to rock your entire block, you won’t need much more power than that. I’ve never turned the volume up over halfway, and even there, it was very loud.
Overall, for the price, this is a solid little receiver that will get the job done. I feel confident that I won’t be needing another for years to come.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 299.99
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Epinions.com ID:
Ahab1973
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Member: Brian
Location: USA
Reviews written: 132
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