YAMAHA RX-V685 A/V RECEIVER AND MUSICCAST 20 WIRELESS SPEAKERS
I GET TO REVIEW a lot of A/V receivers. Familiarity breeding— well, familiarity— I confess that I tend to sort new examples into one of three classes. The flagship models cost a lot, pump out 140 or so watts from each of at least nine and often more channels, and they tend to cram in every conceivable feature. Entry-level jobs are cheap, five- or seven-channel affairs that usually top out at 65-or-so real watts per channel and incorporate more basic feature sets. Everything in between I callously lump into the “commodity-class” rubric. These are the ones nearly everybody actually ends up buying, and for good reason: they’re still heavily featured and impressively capable, but seductively priced at one-third to one-half what the cruisers and battleships cost, and just a couple of Franklins above the cheap ‘n’ cheerfuls.
But much like Orwell’s farm animals, some, like Yamaha’s latest example, the $599 RX-V685, are more individual than others. The V685 has all the expected check boxes: Dolby ATMOS/DTS:X surround decoding with seven onboard channels of amplifier power to provide for a 5.1.2 front-height setup (or 7.1 surround with surround-back speakers); HDMI with full HDR compatibility and video processing including output resolution up to 4K; and a generous helping of wired and wireless streaming-audio options, including Pandora and Tidal, plus full participation in Yamaha’s proprietary Musiccast multiroomaudio ecosystem.
Unfortunately, along with most of its class cohort the V685 lacks the line-level rear-height outputs that would permit users to add an outboard stereo amplifier, such as a mothballed stereo receiver or integrated amp, to provide power for a “full” 5.1.4-channel ATMOS/DTS:X system. Pretty much in concert, the industry seems to have agreed (with “No collusion!” I’m sure), to force buyers requiring nine-channel capability to move up-range to the near-flagship models at the $1,200 or higher price level. That’s a shame in my book since system-growth expansion options are a foundation stone of the A/V hobby, something that lures unsuspecting users every deeper into audio and home theater.
Two factors set the new Yamaha RX-V685 apart. One is the firm’s longstanding Dsp-surround, an ability that can bloom stereo (and surround) recordings into richer, more detailed ambient experiences than can Dolby or DTS “Music” modes. Brand-y has been the leading proponent of applying digital signal processing to the recreation of acoustic environments for some four decades, and its technical expertise, at least in the consumer space, is without serious rival. I am in general a fan: when judiciously applied to selected— that is, naturally recorded—acoustic music, Yamaha’s processing, currently marketed by the company under the “Cinema DSP 3D” rubric, can deliver a remarkable simulacrum of natural space.
The second is the V685’s option to deploy a pair of Yamaha’s Musiccast wireless speakers in the surround position, obviating the need for long speaker-wire runs to the rear of the room (see sidebar). Musiccast is Yamaha’s proprietary
wireless-multiroom ecosystem, competing in the distributedmusic space with rivals such as Sonos and Denon’s HEOS. Yamaha also states that the
V685 can integrate Amazon Alexa voice-assistant control through Musiccast, a feature my dystopia-phobia prevented me from exploring.
SETUP
Unboxing Yamaha’s latest revealed the familiar, black-rectangle format (would somebody
please make an AVR in a different shape, like a sphere, maybe, or a banana?), with a single volume knob and numerous small, tinily-labeled pushbuttons for input and mode selection and other functions. (Apparently, our onscreen era makes legible panel graphics superfluous. I can’t think of any A/V receiver fascia that does not require a flashlight and a magnifying glass.) Hooking up the usual complement of HDMI and speaker cables, I set the V685 into my system in a 5.1.2-channel configuration, with front-height “ceiling-bounce” speakers perched atop my long-serving Energy Veritas standmount monitors. The Yamaha’s speaker outs are plastic multi-ways spaced too wide to accept standard half-inch dual-bananas, alas.
Yamaha’s proprietary YPAO (Yamaha Parametric Acoustic Optimizer) auto-setup/room-eq routine runs along a familiar path: You plug in the supplied small microphone, place it at the listening position, run the setup routine, and wait while the receiver cycles through a series of bursts and bleeps. (Yamaha provides a clever little knockdown cardboard stand for the mic, though I used my usual full-sized tripod.) YPAO collects data from only a single mic placement and does not show EQ results in either a graph or data, but the distance, speaker-size, and channel-level results it obtained were all within range of what I had previously set manually. The system’s EQ correction seemed to dial in a milder version of the effect I usually hear from full-bore systems like Audyssey EQ32: slightly tighter bass and more focused ambience in the upper-midrange region. But since my speaker/room setup is quite accurate above about 100 Hz, corrections tend to be modest from any system. Thus, as always, I did the bulk of my listening with the system bypassed.
PERFORMANCE
My first order of business with any receiver or amplifier is two-channel, unprocessed listening, for which I turned to the V685’s Pure Direct mode: direct as in stereo, no-subwoofer, unprocessed, full-range playback. And like virtually all the receivers I encounter these days, including many surprisingly inexpensive examples, the Yamaha proved a very capable basic amplifier. It had no difficulty driving my antiquebut-effective Energy three-way monitors—a moderately difficult loudspeaker load—to convincing levels on both rock and orchestral classical, and they sounded lively and dynamic doing so.
A solid recording like Duke Robillard’s “Rain Came Falling Down” (via a Tidal FLAC stream) maintained plenty of bite and attack from Duke’s understated guitar licks and preserved an easy clarity from the bright snare hits and the loping cymbal ride hovering over the tune’s heavy New Orleans walk, even at pretty demanding volumes. Another Tidal stream, the opening Allegro of the familiar Mozart d-minor piano concerto (k466), played with odd severity but great clarity by the jazz hands of Keith Jarrett, had no difficulty in presenting at concert-like levels without strain or congestion, and with fine textural integrity and impressive clarity and
“ping” from the piano single-line attacks. As I’ve done many times before, I marveled at the ability of an inexpensive, heavily integrated multichannel amp to approach the transparency and dynamics of my much more costly, everyday separate components. Did it match them? Probably not, but it came surprisingly close.
The V685 has a sort of medium-sized helping of Yamaha’s DSP prowess. There’s the usual long list of available programs, including a half-dozen or so music-appropriate ones like Hall in Munich, Chamber, and The Bottom Line, plus plenty more A/v-oriented options. There’s even one named Roleplaying Game, which I confess misses my demographic altogether. User-adjustable parameters like Hall Size and effect DSP let the listener dial in effects to suit speakers, room, and taste, but for the most part Yamaha’s defaults are reasonably restrained. As a rule, I generally still choose to dial back effect levels and “room sizes” by a couple of clicks for a subtler but still important contribution. For example, a hi-rez DSD track of a Haydn horn concerto (Channel Classics), a superbly naturalsounding recording to begin with, gained, via my personalized “Hall in Vienna” program, a