First thoughts...
Upon opening the box of the RX-a3010 the first thing you will notice is the build quality of the chassis. If you’ve ever encountered Yamaha’s Z series, now discontinued, you’ll quickly notice the similarity in the robustness and the sleek looks of the Aventage range and the Z series. With the previous top of the range Z11 carrying the hefty price tag of $8,500, you can’t help but ask yourself: How have Yamaha introduced their top of the range RX-a3010 at a fraction of the price at $2,699? Yamaha seem confident that the RX-a3010 will deliver the goods that the Z11 did and on top of that they show their confidence with a 4 year warranty that includes a 1 year replacement warranty. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I’m aware, no other manufacturer is doing that. If I was in the market for a new home theatre receiver this would sway my opinion greatly.
Technical Analysis
Regarding its connectivity, the RX-a3010 comes to the party ready to accommodate every possible need. The entire Aventage range comes with more HDMI, S Video, Component Video and audio inputs than you can poke a stick at. Some of this may seem passé in today’s digital age, but just wait till grandma visits and brings the old Betamax around to show you their home movies of the caravan trip they took in 1980. Whilst some other manufacturers are scaling back the inputs on their amplifiers, Yamaha haven’t and although you may never use them it’s always nice to have too much than not enough.
'The surround sound processing was second to none'
Now let’s connect everything up and take a listen. We connected the RX-a3010 to a pair of B&W CM9 Theatre pack. This speaker package pushes the $10K mark and could easily be paired with amplification worth roughly the same amount. So let’s see how they perform driven by the modestly priced RX-a3010 (I wasn’t expecting miracles to say the least). Avatar seems the test disc of this year so lets chuck that in. Firstly let me say....WOW! Home theatre receivers have come a long way. As a 2 channel purist I’ve spent many hours cringing through 2 minute demos of Pearl Harbour at my mate’s house on his ‘Kick Ass’ home theatre set up. Normally I’m wincing at every explosion and the subwoofer is bouncing around in the corner, setting the neighbours Rottweiler off. But with the Yamaha what occurred was a very capable home theatre receiver doing its job perfectly. In 5.1 the amp remained tight sounding whilst having rich bass and midrange. Sometimes the Kevlar drivers in the B&W’s are a little power hungry but the Yamaha had plenty of room and drove them with ease. The surround sound processing was second to none and when forcing the amp into pure direct mode and listening to music the result was astounding. The surround sound processing seems second to none. When comparing other amps in its price range I noticed an amazing amount of ambient sounds in the movie that the other amps seem to not deliver at all! The Yamaha is a critical amp and whatever is going on in the film you are going to hear it!
4 Year Warranty
Aside from the surround sound and video processing side of the RX-a3010 there also comes a vast array of networking features and other goodies. Gone are the days when an amp just drove a couple of speakers. The Yamaha will stream music from your PC and Internet radio from across the globe. This can all be operated by a free application for your iPhone or smart phone.
My Conclusion
The only things I would have like to have seen from the RX-a3010 would have been a DAB tuner and built in WiFi. But these are two things that aren’t available on anything else on the market anyway and it’s really just clutching at straws as this amp is an all round killer! Definitely highly recommended from us here at Audio Solutions.
Review from Lucas Nathaniel, Audio Solutions
