Yamaha Aventage RX-A8A 11-channel AV receiver A perfect 10?
It’s the big one – Yamaha’s very toppermost one-box model in its latest Aventage series of AV receivers, with the company also celebrating 10 years of Aventage, or spilling into 11 years given the trials of the last 18 months. Yamaha has one of the longest track records in modern surround sound, and has consistently topped awards listings, including the Sound+Image Awards, with previous models. No pressure, then.
Inputs & layouts
The Aventage RX-A8A offers 11 channels of amplification, the first Yamaha model to do so since the RX-Z11 back in 2007 when the whole Aventage concept was still a twinkle in the eyes of its engineers. With all 11 channels and two subwoofer feeds available via pre-out sockets as well as via 13 sets of speaker outputs, that’s vast flexibility both for the main system you choose to set up, and for the ability to switch between different configurations, especially as Yamaha now allows four entirely different speaker patterns to switch between. That’s incredibly useful, especially when used in combination with Yamaha’s ‘Scene’ preset memories.
The 11 channels of power will therefore fully serve a 7.1.4. speaker layout, meaning 7-channel surround on the floor and four channels of height. If you have two subwoofers, the RX-A8A can deliver genuinely differentiated bass signals to these as either left/right or front/back, making a true 7.2.4 system.
And of course it can deliver anything less – 7.2.2, 5.1.4, down to straight stereo or 2.1. All these lesser formats will leave you with spare amplifier channels, which can be allocated in various ways. You can biamp your front stereo speakers using separate cables, assuming they are biwire/biampable with two sets of terminals. You can run speaker cables to a different zone playing stereo – two zones, in fact, if you have four channels
