YAMAHA RX-A2060BL 9.2-Channel AV Receiver

The Cherry on top of my Home Theater SundayI had a HK home theater receiver from 12 years ago that died. Over the last year, I first upgraded my speakers, then bought a new Sony BD player last month, and this month I got this Yamaha receiver at a great model year end close out price. I have had the receiver for 16 days and am getting acquainted with its powers and performance. I was hoping that it would have plenty of power for my Polk Audio RTI A5s, CSI A6 and RTI A1 surrounds. And it does! No need to add an external amp to drive the front left and right A5 speakers. Loud for movies is -35 db and for music -37 to -40 db. I may, in the future, add front presence/Atmos speakers, but I am very happy with good old 5.1 surround.HDMI switching is fast and without any problems. So far, I'm very happy with the receiver. The set-up was easy. The complaints against the remote seem to be overblown. The remote is easy to use and to cycle thru the different audio settings and to switch from HDMI 1 (BD player), HDMI 2 (cable TV) and my analog audio input from my computer. My A5s like the power provided for 2 channel and sound very dynamic, balanced and detailed. This is my second Yamaha and I am fast becoming a devoted fan. The reviews I read about the higher tier Aventage receivers praised the very excellent sound quality and they are spot on. With new movies, I find myself being as interested in the dynamic, surround sound movie sound tracks as I am with the visuals.

I bought this receiver in replacement of an Onkyo TX-NR3008, which exhibited Onkyo's ongoing and shameless disregard for product quality. I was an Onkyo user for nearly 40 years, starting with my parents' TX-6500, and after my first personally bought TX-866, which is superb and continues to work to this day, I had problems with every subsequent receiver I foolishly bought from them. So I invite Onkyo to go to Hades. I was a loyal enthusiast of their equipment for decades, but they blew it, and they've crossed me for the last time. But I digress…The build quality of this Yamaha unit appears very good. It is heavy, and on-board controls exhibit a solid feel. After you manually adjust audio settings, the unit delivers a warm, well controlled soundscape that captures a high degree of realism and presence. This receiver also delivers much better low volume performance than the TX-NR3008, which, even when set to correct for low/high volume extremes, never did so effectively. On-screen menus from the RX-A2060 are presented in 1080P, which yields quite nice, sharp looking text. And navigating server based audio files is a swift and responsive experience. This is nice, since that constitutes my most common method of playback. Among others, the RX line supports FLAC (my format of choice), mp3 (obviously), WAV, and Apple Lossless (ALAC being a format Onkyo annoyingly didn’t feel like supporting on my former ‘3008). And there are a multitude of other playback option capabilities, including AirPlay, Bluetooth, etc.. You can also set the receiver to permit switching of sources without having to turn the unit fully on. If you only care to use the TV speakers when watching something, not having to turn the receiver on to switch sources, then turning it back off again, is nice. The available iOS controller app is responsive and well designed, overall. The receiver also runs considerably cooler than my Onkyo did. This should lend itself to lesser chance of drying out capacitors and such, as Onkyo vomited out to the world in their past HDMI board debacle.While overall I feel I’ll be able to live with this receiver, there are some shortcomings that Yamaha should be embarrassed by. So the “AVENTAGE” brand is their finest line of receivers available, and they give us a remote control like THIS?? Here’s a rundown of the failings of this painfully loathsome remote:1. Incredibly small, tightly packed, generically labeled buttons.2. They shoved television buttons at the bottom of the poorly shaped unit, so controlling television functions with one hand is extremely difficult. You obviously have to control your TV all the time, so this is quite grating.3. Buttons are not backlit at all. Good luck trying to do anything complex via remote, in darkness. Yamaha doesn’t seem to get the idea that many people will be using this receiver in home theater environments— Where it’s, you know, dark. The Onkyo receiver I bought 20 years ago at least had backlit keys. Common, Yamaha. Geeze, already.4. Yamaha says you can program the remote to control devices beyond just your TV, like a Blu-Ray player. They even give you instructions in the manual how to do so, using specific manufacturer codes. The problem is, the instructions are abjectly wrong, and don’t work. So you can forget about just using one remote to control everything-- You’re going to have to reach for your other one to pause a Blu-Ray, connect to Amazon Prime or Netflix, etc.. And yes, I have been using the latest manual available (as of 12/12/2016, downloaded from Yamaha itself). Hey, at least my Blu-Ray player remote is backlit— Maybe I can use that as sort of a flashlight so I can see my &$^# Yamaha remote.5. There are no physical “Page” buttons on the remote itself. For instance, when navigating through DLNA server based audio files, you have to arrow over to the on-screen Page/10-page skip control. This constitutes a lot of annoying button presses you have to go through.Other shortcomings of lesser infuriating significance:1. Yamaha’s implementation of “YPAO™” is quite poor compared to the Audyssey system on my old Onkyo. Speaker distances and level settings were flat out wrong, and I had to manually correct nearly every speaker in my 9.1 setup. And yes, I had microphone placement correctly situated. Yamaha’s system just doesn’t work very well, and the experience mirrored by others seem to confirm this.2. There is no on-screen volume indication at all. It’s only shown on the front display of the receiver itself.3. Playback of digital audio files only counts up, on screen. There is no progress bar, and no indication of how long the track is. You can't even toggle between counting up or down. This isn’t a deal breaker, but I find that lack of information extremely annoying. Yamaha just doesn’t get some really brainless niceties in UI.4. Cover art is a hit and miss affair on this receiver. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll show you the image when you’re playing a digital file, maybe not. Good luck.5. During playback, you can’t fast forward or rewind digital files unless it's an .mp3. For .flac, .wav, and everything else, you can start and stop playback, but that’s it. Pressing the fast forward or rewind buttons on the remote during playback of these type of files does nothing. Really, Yamaha? This is a joke.6. You can turn Blutooth off in the receiver's settings. That's great and all, but then, if you forget Bluetooth is off, and you select “Bluetooth” on the remote or receiver, the receiver will switch to Bluetooth and just sit there. It doesn't say, “Bluetooth Off”, or otherwise give you any indication at all that Bluetooth is unavailable (because it's off). I wasted a lot of time trying to connect a Bluetooth device to the receiver and getting nowhere. Then I realized I had turned Bluetooth off in settings. Earth to Yamaha, if Bluetooth is off, and you select “Bluetooth” on the receiver, the unit should *$&#^# say “Bluetooth Off”, or “Bluetooth use unavailable until service is turned on”. A simple reminder would save users a huge amount of wasted time. Thanks a lot, Yamaha.7. If you’re toggled to any of the on-screen page display functions, such as “Page up”, down, etc., and you press the remote control “Return” button, nothing happens. It shouldn’t matter where you are in receiver functions at the time. If you press the damn “Return” (AKA back) button, the receiver should go to the previous screen. Period. But, it doesn’t. Another smooth move, Yamaha.8. When you select "Net" input, in this case my server hosted audio library, the receiver automatically up and starts playing the last played file. And you can't stop it from *$&#& doing that anywhere in receiver settings. Yamaha decided for us that it's going to have the unit annoyingly start playing whatever you last played. Hey Yamaha, I'll tell YOU what I want the receiver to do, and when to start playing a bloody audio file. This uncontrollable action on their part is just inconsiderate at best, incompetent at worst.9. This is common failing amongst receiver manufacturers, not just Yamaha, but the RX-A2060 won't recognize image files (such as .jpg), nor will it recognize common video files. I find this annoying, as I host family photos and videos on the same store as my audio library, and being able to access ALL of these files from the receiver would be nice. As it is, for instance, if I want to show a photo slideshow on my TV, I have to power up my Blu-Ray player and have it handle the job. It's 2016, for flipping sake. Someone throw us a bone and build a receiver that can display a 20-year-old-technology .jpg file.So, all in all, I’m about 60/40 in terms of my satisfaction and dissatisfaction with this supposedly premium receiver. I went with Yamaha because most sources seem to feel their quality is the best in the industry, and as long as it lives up to this reliability expectation, maybe, just maybe I can tolerate the other shortcomings. At least I'm not dealing with Onkyo.

This is a full featured receiver with a lot to commend it. Everything has worked well, even the iPhone App. But recently a problem cropped up, the BlueTooth function stopped working on some, but not all, inputs. I've tried everything I can think of. It was working one day and the next day it wasn't and I have changed nothing. It finds my BT receiver and connects just fine but no audio on DirecTv and FireStick inputs. Streaming my iTunes Library works fine. So only four stars, otherwise it would be five. I'll update if I find a solution.Update: Well it just started working again. I didn't do anything different so go figgur. The best I can say is BlueTooth intermittent.

Love it. Have had many Yamaha receivers over the years and this one is awesome!

This 2016 Yamaha 2060 I purchased on sale as the 2017s were out. It replace my outdated 2003 Yamaha 3300. IQ Home Entertainment shipped it to me on time and in perfect condition. There are so many new features on the 2060 that it wouldn't be fair to compare it to my old receiver. Most importantly my HDMI 2.0a 4K UHD HDR10 Sony player and Samsung TV work perfectly with the Yamaha 2060. (I have no need for HDMI 2.1 in other words so it was a good time to buy)For streaming music, the Airplay and Bluetooth both work great with my Amazon Music App on iphone and ipad. Other music apps are built-in such as Pandora Plus which are even easier to use. The remote is good but I find myself using the iphone Yamaha remote app almost as much as the regular remote.As far as tips, the one frustration I had was when I tried out multiroom MusicCast (works great by the way) was that it changed the lip sync feature off automatically and then the only way to get it back on was to change it at the iphone app and not on the receiver itself. I googled and found someone who had the answer to how to fix that but it was not something intuitive and luckily I found that post. Otherwise I would have been calling Yamaha to figure that one out. Now that I know that trick, I'm 100% satisfied with this receiver. This receiver has so many options and I hope it lasts me as long as the last one did!