Yamaha Aventage RX-A2070 A/v Receiver

PRICE $1,600

- Daniel Kumin

ONCE, RECEIVERS USED TO receive (radio waves), and amplify, period. They still do, but those are almost beside-the-point functions. Receivers nowadays are more concerned with decoding, casting, wireless-connecting, virtualizing, surround-formatting, multi-room extending, auto-analyzing, and more. In fact, I don’t know why we still call these things “receivers,” but, whatever.

Yamaha’s new Aventage RX-A2070 nine-channel AVR tackles all those tasks and numerous others, likely including a few that I missed altogether. (For all I know, it can make crêpes or work as a crockpot: The manual runs to 208 pages, and I won’t pretend to have read all of them.) And this isn’t even the top of the line: For $400 more, there’s an RX-A3070 that adds 11.2-channel processing, XLR line outputs, and a few other fillips.