"Official" RX-V1900/RX-V3900 Thread - Page 9

I am jealous. Mine should be in later this week--I hope

maybe i get mine soon

So I guess Yamaha was right about what they told me. I hope to get my demo in by THU.

The sticker at the front panel, what is the best practice to get that off? Without having glue left on the panel?

Having owned numerous Yamaha receivers with the same type of sticker, it has never left any residue when I peeled it off. You should be fine.

I myself am expecting RXV3900 within about 3 weeks here in Australia, but am considering the Z7 instead to replacemy 3800. Unfortunately no current ETA on those.

Received email from Yamaha that they have the 3900 in stock and ready to ship. Website confirms.
http://www.yamahashoponline.com/prod...M+RX%2DV3900BL

Got my 3900 last night. Still lots of work to go getting everything setup.

Some initial impressions:

- Many fewer instances of relay chatter when switching sources, sound field programs, etc.

- Many slight differences (improvements, it seems) between the UI of the 3800 on the GUI and front panel and the 3900.

- I believe unit had been repackaged at Yamaha. The foam wrapping tape had been lifted once and there was a slight tear in that foam. The tape holding the front panel shut was askew. The warranty card was caught between the foam inserts and the receiver and wrinkled up. Most interesting was an extra (!) microphone in box wedged loose in between the foam inserts and with a piece of the blue tape used to hold the receiver door shut stuck to the box and the receiver's foam wrapping. Also there was a manual errata sheet. If anybody comes up short a cal microphone, I got your's. Perhaps there was a last minute firmware update or something? Maybe that was a component of the availability delay?

- Volume for optical digital inputs (all of them I tested which is three in number) seems a lot lower (15 or 20 db?) than for, say, tuner, iPod, and the audio coming from HDMI. More to go looking into this.

- Beyond that, everything tested so far seems to work as advertised including HD Radio and the web server control.

- To a posting earlier in the thread: I did check power consumption in the various standby modes with my KillAWatt. I was somewhat shocked:

Main Off: 1.0pf 0W 0VA
"real" standby: 0.26pf 0W 1VA
standby with HDMI 1->3 passing HDMI: 0.70pf 63W 91VA
standby with HDMI not passing: 0.69pf 62W 89VA
network standby: 0.70pf 62W 89VA
both network standby and HDMI 1->3 passing HDMI: 0.70pf 66W 92VA

That's like leaving a 90W light bulb on 24x7! The manual says higher power consumption is a side effect of both of these modes without characterizing that, but this is almost half what it uses running two channel stereo -40db. It's just shy of what my Windows Home Server (2GB memory, 3x 1TB hard disks) uses. I'm sure it's driven by the inefficiencies of the single power supply being on but at almost no load. And I'll probably leave it that way (since both features were key components in my decision to upgrade from the 3800 to the 3900) despite its considerable annual addition to my power bill and non-green behavior. Yo, YAMAHA! Get with the Green program here!

- In what little I've critically listened to it so far, it looks and sounds great.

Much more "work" to go here…

Anybody have a URL to download Receiver Manager for the 3900?

Wow, over 2kWh per day, and 780 a year. That could cost $100 a year or more in some parts of the world (good job you don't live in Bermuda where they pay $0.37 per kWh!).


Does it look like the Web browser control interface could replace Receiver Manager, or is it more limited? e.g. can it be used to save and restore all your settings?

One other thing, can you please confirm that you can still change speaker levels on the fly without seeing anything on screen (no GUI, and (if you disable it) no short messages)? Noone else watching a movie with me wants to see crap on screen when I'm fiddling with speaker levels. On the 663 apparently the LEVEL button on the remote brings up the GUI and can't be disabled.

Same for the INFO button on the remote. Can you get signal info on the front panel only, or does it always show something on screen?

As I said, I was shocked at how much this uses to do so little. I suspect they just didn't design in a separate supply and the original standby supply--that just had to listen for the remote to wake it up--wasn't sufficient to run the web server and HDMI standby. So they use the other--main--supply. Pretty bad in these days of Green conciousness.


I haven't been in all of its nooks and crannies yet, but I see *no* hint how to save/restore settings. It looks like I can get at lots of settings, but there are many I haven't seen a hint how to control like soundfield and many of the GUI menu choices for setup and so on.


I know there's interest in this and I thought of that open question about ten minutes after I turned off the lights and just before I finally got to sleep. (Which was well after midnight at that.) I do know the GUI overlays HDMI. I do not recall having noticed what happens with the short messages. Sorry. I'll try to remember to check that tonight.


Front panel only. LOTS of info in all of the sources. (Less info, for instance, for XM since signal strength is now just four bars rather than the numeric indicator on the 3800.) But no info on the video GUI. The Zone GUI, OTOH, also displays a lot more info than it did on the 3800.

Oh, and no big numbers on the volume via remote--still the bar graph.

One other thing I noticed:

- The wire tail on the AM loop antenna (the US round HD version, that is) is about a foot shorter than the tail was on the smaller 3800 loop. This is making locating the antenna far enough away from the PRO-110FD so that AM reception doesn't get trashed a LOT harder. I'd just use some additional twisted pair to extend it, but there is also a ferrite bead on the Yamaha antenna and I'm sure it got there because the FCC wouldn't have liked it any other way.

Mine (3900) also showed up last night. Will start working on it tonight or tomorrow. Glad to see many of us are receiving it at the same time.

OSD works - I get volume and the GUI lays over 'whatever' is on TV screen.

But...no frickin sub? Everything works fine but can't get my sub to work - tried two and two different cables.

Ok...now that my dumb ass figured out the sub thing...going to dig in a bit deeper today. One of the joys of being home office based (thank you HP!).

Nah, plain 'ol HP.

I ran the auto set-up...it keeps putting my Hsu center and Paradigm mains at 'Large/60Hz'...so, I clicked them back to small at 80...I think that's ok, or should I leave it?

I think you'll do a better job than YPAO on choosing the speaker size and crossover. But when you want to set particular values manually, I think you should do it before running YPAO, not after. i.e. set the values you want, then run YPAO and tell it to skip the speaker size check (but still do EQ etc.).

I'm not 100% certain, but there's a pretty good chance that the EQ decisions it makes are based on the speaker sizes and crossover, in which case it needs to know your choice in advance.

I notice that BestBuy in Canada has the HTR-6290 in stock. It should be identical to the 1900 (if the 6190 is anything to go by).

The price isn't great now, but watch out for a sale (that's how I got my 6190 last year).

Grrrrrr 2 more hrs till I get to go home and open the box and play. FrostyMelon don't feel bad we all have made mistakes like that.

Yeah, I set them to small and tried to run the set-up again and kept giving me 'no FL speaker' message. After backing out and back in a few times it finally ran set-up.

*Forgot - this thing gets HOT AS HELL! The top is pretty damn warm, but the bottom...even more so. Luckily I am upgrading my shelf set-up so I'll get better airflow with new rack.

**Another edit - the network 'stuff' works well. I am streaming music from the PC now...going to check out Rhapsody (free trial with Comcast) soon, the iPod, and see what internet radio is all about.

Just got my DEMO in! Will post pictures and my opinion as soon as I set it up

Now I'm starting to get worried. What with DickW shocked by the power consumption and FrostyMelon having problems with the auto setup and commenting that it runs HOT AS HELL.

Is the 3900 going to be the receiver we were expecting or something not so good ?

I'm just hoping for stellar reviews of it's audio and video capabilities

I'm picking up a RXV1900 tonight to see if the hdmi works with my older tv. (had issues with denons 3808 and 4308. Anyway, I'm running martin logan's rated at 5ohms according to their site. Should I keep the yamaha at it's 8ohm setting or change it to 6ohms?

Yeah, they all run hot. Even more so with this one since there is so much crammed into it. I also have it in a tight cabinet, so it's tough for the heat to escape.

The PQ using HDMI is superb. The AQ through the PS3 using Blu-Ray is superb, along with everything else I've run through it (HDTV and the gaming via 360). I am using 'pass-through' right now with HDMI video, but going to switch it over to processing to see how well that looks.

But, some of the guys around here are a lot more savvy than I...so I am sure once they get theirs up and running we will hear a lot more.

*To add - I think it's important to point out that this unit worked as promised, right out of the box (aside from late night bone head plugging the Sub into the wrong port). The YPAO issue was minimal, and it kicked on after backing out three times. I am someone that has spent his entire life in tech (though noob in HT), so for something to be so seamless right out of the box...big PLUS.

**I am really loving the whole network audio thing.

Having owned a 2700 and currently a 3800, I find the 3800 certainly runs cooler than the 2700 did, so hoping the 3900 (and Z7) are on a par with the 3800.

Volume and level changes show up OSD overlaid unless Short Message Display is Off.

Don't misread--the features that require this power consumption in standby work exactly as I expected and desired. I'm just shocked at the cost the design imposes on my power bill and carbon footprint.

For what I bought it to do, so far I'm very pleased. 110%? Never. I'm an engineer.