Last month Ara picked up an Apple TV for use in his media room. That became the fourth HDMI device which was one device too many for his Yamaha RX-V2700 receiver. So he contacted Pioneer to see if he could review the Pioneer VSX-94TXH 7.1 A/V Receiver. In actuality, Ara was auditioning the receiver for his own personal use. Within a few days the receiver showed up and it's not going back! Just so everyone is clear, Ara has to pay for the receiver to keep it.
Features
- HDMI® 1.3a (4 inputs/1 output)
- DTS-HD® & Dolby® TrueHD Decoders
- DLNA® Compliant Network Music and Internet Radio via I/P
- Faroudja® DCDi Video Scaler
- Advanced MCACC precision environment tuning - The auto calibration is the best that we have come across. We did not need to adjust any of the settings once it was done.
The VSX-94TXH is a beautiful machine albeit substantial in size and weight. The receiver weighs 41.4 lbs (18.7Kgs) and measures 16 9/16" (42 cm) x 7 3/8" (18.7 cm) x 18 1/16" (45.9 cm) (W x H x D). It has a nice piano black finish that looks great, but you can definitely see finger prints. But who actually touches their equipment? The size and weight are definitely put to use producing 140 watts of power per each of its seven channels.
As an aside, when reading the product specs I ran across a term called Symmetrical Power Train Design. I couldn't find any documentation on what it was. But since it was in the product specification it must be important right? For nothing more than clarification we asked Pioneer what this was, this is their explanation:
The Pioneer Elite A/V receivers each feature power amps for seven channels. Accurate multi-channel sound reproduction is possible only when the operating environment of one channel is physically identical to that of the others. Therefore, with the new Pioneer Elite receivers, power output devices for the left channels (front, surround and surround back) are mounted on the heat sinks symmetrically with respect to the right channels.
Setup
Setup was as straight forward as it can be when introducing a new receiver into your system. Connections were simple since most of the gear being used supported HDMI. HDMI does make life easy in cable management and universal remote programming. The only complication was using an HDMI to DVI cable between the Mac Mini and the receiver. Since the DVI cable does not carry audio, the optical output of the Mini was connected to the DVD input of the receiver. We then had to tell the 94TXH to use one of the HDMI inputs for the video. In general we like the flexibility the receiver has in assigning inputs and outputs.
After everything was routed we ran the Pioneer auto calibration to tune the room. Auto calibration is something most manufacturers are putting into their systems to get th...
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