This is a review and measurements of the Yamaha RX-A3080 Audio/Video Receiver. It was kindly purchased by a member as a refurbished unit and sent to me.
This is last year's model and motivation for testing was that it shares the same amplification as this year's models which have very different interface. Current price for this unit is $1,999.
Here is the back side:
Like the inclusion of XLR inputs and outputs. Unit was factory reset before testing. The procedure is not in the menus and is quite obscure. Upon activation, it switched into Japanese
, requiring some effort to figure out how turn it back into English. Why not make it easier to turn the unit into English? Vast majority of the world population can read the word English in an AV product so please, make it easy to set it to this language.
Peaking inside the unit, I see the usual cheap, bent spring steel for heatsinks rather than proper extruded aluminum. I expect the premier unit from Yamaha to do better here. This did reduce the weight some as I expected the unit to be heavier. And in my testing, it ran reasonably cool.
Yamaha RX-A3080 Measurements
As usual, I started to measure the DAC portion by using the pre-amp output, only to be punched in the face by the AVR going into protection mode. As far as I can tell, there is no way to shut off the amps so not only do they disturb the analog outputs, but also don't let you crank it up to full volume beyond what the internal amps can handle. What were they thinking? Have they fixed it in this year's model? Anyway, the motivation was the amplifier anyway so let's jump into that.
Here is our usual dashboard:
This type of performance lands the unit in the middle of the pack:
Distortion is actually better than this but we have a tall power supply (rectifier) induced spike at 120 Hz which is limiting SINAD. Signal to noise ratio is good actually:
My target is 96 dB at 5 watts and we are one bit short of that.
Frequency response is nice and flat given the non-switching amplifier:
Crosstalk was rather disappointing:
It is quite far from state of the art amplifier.
Multitone performance is good:
The bell of the ball in an AVR is amount of power it has so let's start with our usual 4 ohm load:
As you see, the curve is horizontal. It should usually slope down meaning as power increases, the ratio of output signal to residual noise improves. Here, the noise is scaling up which I am assuming is the aforementioned power supply noise at 120 Hz. So what starts at average to better than average performance, ends with almost tie with the worst measured.
Power level is healthy though and improves with higher allowance for distortion:
Switching to 8 ohm we see that we essentially get the company advertised power:
I was dismayed that I had to dial down the max power in the following test as the amp would go into protection mode at higher frequencies:
Conclusions
The weakness in the amplification stage of the RX-A3080 is actually its power supply generating rectification noise. Fortunately our threshold of hearing goes up at such a low frequency so audible performance would be better. Still, there was not much in these measurements to make me smile. You can do much better with Yamaha's competitors.
I can't recommend the Yamaha RX-A3080 as a whole or its for amplification.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
This is last year's model and motivation for testing was that it shares the same amplification as this year's models which have very different interface. Current price for this unit is $1,999.
Here is the back side:
Like the inclusion of XLR inputs and outputs. Unit was factory reset before testing. The procedure is not in the menus and is quite obscure. Upon activation, it switched into Japanese
, requiring some effort to figure out how turn it back into English. Why not make it easier to turn the unit into English? Vast majority of the world population can read the word English in an AV product so please, make it easy to set it to this language. Peaking inside the unit, I see the usual cheap, bent spring steel for heatsinks rather than proper extruded aluminum. I expect the premier unit from Yamaha to do better here. This did reduce the weight some as I expected the unit to be heavier. And in my testing, it ran reasonably cool.
Yamaha RX-A3080 Measurements
As usual, I started to measure the DAC portion by using the pre-amp output, only to be punched in the face by the AVR going into protection mode. As far as I can tell, there is no way to shut off the amps so not only do they disturb the analog outputs, but also don't let you crank it up to full volume beyond what the internal amps can handle. What were they thinking? Have they fixed it in this year's model? Anyway, the motivation was the amplifier anyway so let's jump into that.
Here is our usual dashboard:
This type of performance lands the unit in the middle of the pack:
Distortion is actually better than this but we have a tall power supply (rectifier) induced spike at 120 Hz which is limiting SINAD. Signal to noise ratio is good actually:
My target is 96 dB at 5 watts and we are one bit short of that.
Frequency response is nice and flat given the non-switching amplifier:
Crosstalk was rather disappointing:
It is quite far from state of the art amplifier.
Multitone performance is good:
The bell of the ball in an AVR is amount of power it has so let's start with our usual 4 ohm load:
As you see, the curve is horizontal. It should usually slope down meaning as power increases, the ratio of output signal to residual noise improves. Here, the noise is scaling up which I am assuming is the aforementioned power supply noise at 120 Hz. So what starts at average to better than average performance, ends with almost tie with the worst measured.
Power level is healthy though and improves with higher allowance for distortion:
Switching to 8 ohm we see that we essentially get the company advertised power:
I was dismayed that I had to dial down the max power in the following test as the amp would go into protection mode at higher frequencies:
Conclusions
The weakness in the amplification stage of the RX-A3080 is actually its power supply generating rectification noise. Fortunately our threshold of hearing goes up at such a low frequency so audible performance would be better. Still, there was not much in these measurements to make me smile. You can do much better with Yamaha's competitors.
I can't recommend the Yamaha RX-A3080 as a whole or its for amplification.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
