Picked up my Elite VSX-82TXS Yesterday

Picked up a Pioneer Elite 82 TXS yesterday afternoon from my local Magnolia.

I had time to do basic auto calibration, fiddle with it a tiny bit and watch a movie.

Super quick thoughts:
-- Lots of pretty lights.
-- MMmmy... shiiny.
-- MCACC auto setup did a much better job than the autosetup on my PE 53. I didn't detect anthing audibly off, and when I check levels, they only oddness was that the center channel was low and bass seemed bloated -- but both of these probably have to do with me fiddling with stuff post calibration.
-- Definitely has more features than the Yamaha 5990 that I was testing with. Based on my very quick listen a movie sound track post auto calibration (Gladiator), it sounded slightly more defined in the mid range than the Denon or Onkyo, but the same as the Yammaha.
-- Easier to use than the Yamaha, IMO, although I preferred the interface on my old PE.
-- No problems with handshaking with the Tosh HD DVD player.
-- The manual is printed on extremely flimsy paper, like I would expect for a $300 receiver. Not sure how well the tissue paper will last.

This afternoon, I'm hoping for a chance to listen to some music and play with setup further.

Sage

Phew. Appointments are done for the today. I now have nothing to do but work on my laptop, and, conveniently, listen to my new receiver. I'll post updates as I have them.

Judring front the printed-on-tissue paper, written by idiots manual, it does appear to both upsample video from analog to digital AND upscale to 720p or 1080i. This is not what I'm using it for, and I have not verified this personally.

As an FYI, there is a sticker on the front of the receiver that indicates it is 1080p ready, which I presume to mean that it will pass a 1080p signal just fine.

Some very quick tests with Avia indicated that I had mucked up the settings after fiddling with them post auto-setup last night. Conveniently, I had tested the "copy" functionality, and had an unchanged data set. I copied that back over the original settings. More careful calibration indicated the level of my left speaker was slightly high, but other than that, other speaker levels were dead on.

Having played around with the advanced receiver settings, I am extremely impressed with variety of options available, including a 3 band PER channel manual or auto parametric EQ (WOW!), a graphic EQ with 10 or 12 bands (more than I recall from my 53), reverb delay optios, settings output to PC.

I haven't really parsed through the settings it chose for my speakers, but it doesn't appear to have gone overboard with the EQ, like some of the auto setup programs do.

Right now I'm listening to Tori Amos 'bee keeper' in 2 channel mode. Some of my intial subjective listening impressions are:

The mid and high bass sounds fuller without being boomy. This is probably because the auto calib correctly identified some significant dips I have measured previously at around 90hz, 120hz and 180hz.

The sound is similarly detailed to the Yamaha 5990 I was listening to yesterday, but sounds more pleasant (how that for subjective?!). It is more comfortable to listen at similar or higher volumes.

When using the Yamaha's automatic-only PEQ, it over emphasized highs and sounded 'processed.' I don't hear anything like that with this receiver.

My setup is:

A tosh HD DVD player being used as the source.
Paradigm S2s
Some 2 and 4" fiberglass at the first reflection points.
Separate pro-audio amps for the front channels.

In recent weeks I have tested the Onkyo 703, Yamaha 5990 and Denon 2807 as a replacement for my old PE 53. On features alone, this receiver is a winner (albeit it is more expensive); audio quality seems noticably (but very subjectively) more pleasing to my ear than both the Onkyo and the Denon, and certainly equal to the Yamaha.

Take all my opinions with a grain of salt!

Sage

By the way, I'm probably be too harsh on the manual, but it IS printed on very thin paper. The manual for my 53 was much nicer.

For those that will be inputting via analog from either an SACD player or a BD / HD DVD player, the receiver does over an LFE +10 dB channel boost.

Okay, the manual doesn't have much information on video stuff, but there are settings for:

Hue (+/- 10)
Contrast (+/- 10)
Resolution (Pure, 480p, 720p, 1080i) -- pure is the passthrough mode
Aspect (Through (no cropping), 4:3 (left and right cropping) and 16:9 (top and bottom cropping)).

So, it looks like you're good.

I don't have cables handy to try analog video input.

Of course, and use it constantly, why?

Hi Enchantr --

I'm going to DVI (i.e. YCbCr to RGB) on my tele, so I have no WTW / BTW regardless. First, there appears to be no visual difference when I befored and aftered with 609 bars and a filter; second I wouldn't expect there to be a difference as the receiver shouldnt be modifying the HDMI signal at all. Don't take that as gospel as my colorimeter is my eye.

None of the receivers I tried (Onkyo, Yamaha, Denon) changed the video image at all.

Sage

I re-checked hue and saturation, and they are indeed where I left them with my last calibration. I don't think the receiver does any processing on the hdmi video signal from the Tosh player.

As an FYI, the 3-band PEQ is only for the front, center and lfe channels. So it's not per channel (i.e. 8 of them) as I originally reported. It has a range from 63 hz to 250hz in fractions of an octave.

Yes, it has a great feature set of things I actually care about. :=) One of the things I've noticed is that percussive noises are simply more... percusive. I believe that this probably because of the automatic per-channel reverb timing that the receiver does. This gives the audio a more intimate feelings; I really noticed this with 2 ch CD audio.

The auto-setup is not perfect, although my space is probably pretty challenging. Among other things I noticed that it dialed a lot of the bass out of my right surround. This was clearly identifiable aurally with a pink noise sweep, and when I checked in the band eq, the 250 hz and 500 hz were both low. Not sure why. It was easy to correct. On the other hand, it nailed my subwoofer distance at 11.0, actual is 10.0, but I have an EQ which adds a very slight delay, probably about 1ms (or 1 ft).

The autosetup is a very good place to start from for fine turning. My previous experience with receiver autosetups with the 53 and the Yamaha 5990 was not as positive.

The advanced codecs were also a concern of mine, however, after I did more research, this was no longer the case.

Here's the deal: HDMI 1.1 / 1.2 support 7.1 channel PCM at 24 bit, 96 Khz, and as long as I buy a disc player that can decode the advanced codecs and pass PCM via HDMI, I get the raw PCM streams to my receiver. It doesn't matter where the decode happens. My receiver can then do any normal processing on the digital streams, without having to convert them back to digital.

The short version is that as long as something in the chair can decode and pass PCM audio, you're good to go with the new codecs.

Sage

Too lazy to find my camera, but the 82 has 3 inputs and 1 output. The back panel looks almost exactly the same as the 53 I had, except that it has copper screws. Facing the front of the avr, video plugs are on the right, audio on the left. Speaker outputs are on the lower left.

The power cord is not grounded and not detachable.

Hi, it appears that the 82 (and maybe the 84 as well?) doesn't have ADCs, so if I understand correctly, it ONLY offers a prue analog path analog multichannel input.

Western Washington state.

I paid less than the MSRP of 1200, but I believe it's against AVS Forum policy to quote prices below MSRP.

So my one significant negative with this receiver is that there seems to be significant line noise when accepting audio from my Toshbia HD DVD player over HDMI. The other receivers I played with did not have similar line noise. It measured at 56 dB at reference 0. I'm going to be out of town for 2 weeks, so I won't have an opportunity to test this further; this could be configuration specific, but it would be great if other folks who get this receiver could note whether they see this or not themselves.