You buy a Blu-ray player here, a gaming console there, and whatever other new AV gear tickles your fancy. Pretty soon, you find yourself with a whole host of things to plug in and a single set of speakers for all of them. You need a proper receiver to organize your home theater. If space (or the lack of it) is a primary concern, you may want to check out the new Yamaha RX-S601.
A slim and compact 5.1-channel AV receiver, it’s about a third smaller than your average rig, so it can fit into tighter nooks of space-starved media cabinets. No more manually plugging in new audio and video sources every time you want to do something different than what you did yesterday – just hook everything up to your brand new receiver and plop straight down on the couch every single time.
The Yamaha RX-S601 comes with extensive connectivity: six HDMI inputs, one HDMI output, three composite video I/O, and eight audio I/O (four analog, two coaxial, one optical), so it should handle most every piece of entertainment gear in your home. It comes with both Bluetooth and WiFi for audio streaming, as well as built-in support for Airplay, Spotify, and Pandora. Of course, it comes with Yamaha’s MusicCast, which enables multi-room audio support for all compatible speakers, along with the ability to allow pass-through of 4K video at 60 fps, so you can enjoy your ultra-HD content in all their glory. Features include extensive audio codec and format support, a USB port for docking a media hard drive, an accompanying app (iOS and Android) for convenient operation, and automatic speaker setup using acoustic analysis.
Slated for availability this month, the Yamaha RX-S601 is priced at $649.95.