Yamaha Home theather System : Review

After a few weeks of thought and research, I zeroed on a home theater system and bought and installed it a week back. It is a Yamaha NS-P436 6.1 Channel Speaker system and a Yamaha HTR 5840 6.1 Home theater receiver. Just before a month, my knowledge of home theater system was very limited and now I know a little. I got this desire to buy one when I experienced the home theater sound at my friends place. He had the same Yamaha NS-P436 but a HTR 5740 receiver, slightly older model. Well, as usual i set out to search and read reviews on the internet for a good home theater system. With a constrained budget, I thought it would be wise for me to simply buy a Home theatre in a Box. There were a lot of 5.1 home theater systems but I wanted a 6.1. So the options were very limited in the Box side. The ones that were there were too big, which means i can’t carry it to India. Onkyo had a fine 7.1 model for $400 but it was too heavy, the whole set was 115 pounds. Even their simpler 6.1 model was heavy and the subwoofer was as big as a suitcase. I didn’t even consider Bose for the price (it started from $999!). So I decided to build my home theater by buying speakers and receivers separately. The final choice I made was what I started with, my friends configuration ! I didn’t get a HTR 5740 so I got the next level model HTR 5840. The speakers are neatly designed and compact enough to be carried back to India. The whole unit weighs a total of 45 pounds (about 20 Kg). It costed me a total of $450, and bought them off the internet.
Highlights:
Speakers : 2 Front Speakers – 100 W each. 1 Center main speaker – 100 W. 3 Surround rear speakers 100W each and a Powered Sub woofer – 100 W. Total output – 700 W.
Receiver – Has it all – Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Pro Logic , Pro Logic II, NEO DTS … all of it! Plus several sound settings. The unit needs a little manual reading, but once you know the basics it is really easy to use ( atleast for all your basic needs). For a detailed spec, please check the Yamaha website.

The verdict, I have only one word – Fantastic. I probably haven’t experienced much home theatre before but this is really superb. I watched two great tamil movies over the weekend – Chandramukhi and Virumaandi. Chandramukhi rocked ! Superstar’s stunt effects were all over my house. The first intro scene was sensational and gave me a feeling of watching it in a theatre in Chennai (Devi theatre). The sound effects were awesome. The climax song – Ra Ra was amazing. While I was watching, I really got a doubt if I was disturbing my neighbour. So during one of the songs in the middle of the movie, I walked upstairs to the apartment above mine and spoke to them politely if I was disturbing them with my movie. Guess what! they heard nothing. I have to give full credits to my apartment design folks, the acoustics is just phenomenal which enabled a superb setting of the system. I also watched a movie on my Cable and since the Set top box had a digital audio out, I was able to watch the movie “The Bourne supremacy” in Dolby Digital. The sound was simply pristine and stunning.

So if you are out there searching for a Home theater with a good sound experience and easy on your pocket and want to carry it back to India, this would be a really good choice.

Caution: Prolonged exposure to high powered sound effects will cause damage to your hearing. I always keep it between -20 to -30 db, it is good enough and the overall sound experience simply depends on the acoustics of your room rather than the speaker volume.

A lesson on Dolby Digital Vs DTS

To all the amateur audiophiles, wannabe’s and just any one who might be interested, I have a little lesson on Dolby Digital and DTS.

I used to think Dolby Digital and DTS only deferred in their brand name and encoding technique, and that the quality of sound is same from both types. It turns out DTS offers much more than Dolby Digital. DTS uses lesser compression than Dolby and hence has less information loss. Dolby uses the lossy AC3 encoding technique. It was last week and I was watching a Tamil Movie – Gillie ( I usually don’t watch Vijay movie, but this one was different, he really kicked some ass!), especially for the roaring sound effects and I must say I was pretty impressed. The DVD had 2 audio options – Dolby Digital (DD) and DTS and my Home theater receiver automatically detected DD. I then chose DTS to see how it sounds, only to be left with a silent living room. Huh! I thought I had to do some setting in my home theater and spent some awful lot of time going through the manual and trying different settings. Well, I gave up after an hour and just watched the movie in DD.

Few days later, I sat down and asked Google what am I missing. I also turned to Wikipedia to learn about Dolby Digital and DTS. Google told me to look closely at my DVD player first, it had a D followed by an inverted D and then the words Dolby Digital on it. I looked for DTS all over and it didn’t seem to be there. The lesson was, I needed a DVD Player which could decode DTS signals and send them as raw output data via Digital out. I bought this player last year when I really didn’t have an idea about Home theater and was not even planning to buy one, the time when I believed consumerism is luxury. So here is something to keep in mind :

1. If you have got a Home theater but don’t have a DVD player which cannot decode DTS, well you have to buy one that does. When you do so, go for the one which has an optical output, it will be much clearer than Digital output.

2. If you don’t have a home theater, but have a DVD player, check if it decodes DTS, otherwise mark it somewhere that when you plan to buy a home theater or when you buy a new DVD player, go for the one which has DTS and optical output.

3. If you have neither, well future proof it by buying the one that has all or perhaps future proof it by waiting for a few months to get that HD DVD player or the blu ray player that can play almost everything.