RATING
THE FIRST A/V receiver I ever reviewed had four channels and five inputs. That was back in nineteen eighty sev… well, never you mind when it was. My point is, AVRs have changed a bit.
Okay, they’ve changed a lot. Today’s example, Yamaha’s next-to-flagship Aventage RX-A6A, boasts 11 channels (9 built-in amplified plus an additional two for an external amp) and, depending on how you count, even more inputs. The company’s user manual alone runs to almost 450 pages. So, in the interest of forest conservation if nothing else, I will leave it to Yamaha’s website to enumerate its countless features and just hit the high points. But you can be confident knowing that if there’s an A/V receiver feature, function, or capability, this new Yamaha incorporates it.
A bit paradoxically, the RX-A6A is a handsomely simple black box that’s almost entirely featureless, with two knobs, six touch-keys, and a small, almost-an-afterthought, display adorning its front panel. That’s it, and I totally get that since nobody uses the million buttons adorning so many AVR front panels. (That’s what the remote control and onscreen menus are for.) The RX-A6A also supports Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice control when using an external speaker from those companies, along with Apple Siri via AirPlay 2.
The RX-A6A features seven HDMI inputs, three of which are HDMI 2.1 (the latest, greatest version with support for 4K/120Hz and 8K/60Hz video pass-through), along with three HDMI outputs (one version HDMI 2.1 with eARC). It also can upscale video to 8K
