How To Choose A Home Theater Receiver - A Buying Guide

what's up guys it's chris majestic and today i want to talk about something that i think a lot of people don't talk about enough and that's how to choose a home theater receiver [Music] so instead of simply telling you exactly which home theater receiver to buy i'm going to give you some general info so you can choose based on your own requirements and limitations now i was originally going to start this out by saying that your budget was the first thing to consider when choosing a receiver but your budget is determined by everything else so technically this comes last the main thing i need you to understand is that there are reasons why cheap home theater receivers are cheap so today i'm going to explain why you should stay away from them now of course you have home theater in a box systems which are usually pretty cheap and come with both a receiver and speakers and these are okay if you're on a super tight budget but they only sound slightly better than a sound bar so i don't usually recommend them so one thing that has a pretty big impact on your budget is the number of speakers you plan on using now i'm not going to go too deep into the basics since i talked about this in the home theater audio tutorial but if you plan on running more than five speakers and a subwoofer then you have to make sure that you get a receiver that supports the additional channels so if you want a 7.1 setup you have to buy a receiver that has 7 channels which is usually a 7.2 channel receiver and if you want something like dolby atmos you need to make sure that the receiver not only supports dolby atmos but that it also supports the number of channels that you need so for example if you plan on running a 5.1.2 setup which is basically a typical 5.1 setup with the additional two overhead atmos speakers then you need a receiver that has at least seven channels so you look for a 7.2 channel receiver any additional speakers you add would increase this number so if you wanted 4 atmos speakers then you would need a 9.2 channel receiver so of course this number just keeps going up from there so once you know the exact setup you want and know the exact number of speakers then you have to pick out some speakers it's important to choose speakers before you buy a receiver or at least have an idea of what type of speakers you want so that you know what wattage is required to power them now this is where things get a little complicated and a lot of subjectivity comes in so i'm gonna try to keep this as simple as possible as a general rule of thumb it's always best to have a receiver or amplifier that's too powerful there are a few reasons for this but the general idea is that clipping is what usually damages speakers and trying to power a set of speakers with a receiver or amplifier that's underpowered will result in clipping which not only sounds bad but can destroy your speakers so for example if you have a set of floor speakers that can handle 80 watts of continuous power or rms then it would be best to buy a receiver or amplify that has a minimum of 80 watts rms per channel but ideally you would want this number to be higher to allow for more headroom and make up for manufacturers who inflate their wattage claims which i'll talk about in a second alright so now you're probably thinking okay so i just need to make sure that the rms rating of my receiver is higher than my speakers right well no unfortunately it's not that simple because of marketing trickery so when you're looking at home theater receiver power ratings you typically see one or more wattage ratings you might see maximum wattage which in every case you could completely ignore or in some cases you might see rms or continuous power well continuous or rms wattage is the number you need to focus on but there are a few other important things to consider about this number first you need to know exactly how many channels were used to come up with that number so as you can see here this receiver says it does 120 watts per channel with two channels driven so in a perfect world this will mean that this receiver can deliver a clean 120 watts to each speaker if only two speakers are used the problem is in a home theater you're using more than two speakers so this number will be lower once you add the rest of the speakers in your setup the other important piece of information we need to know is the total harmonic distortion or thd now i'm not going to go super deep into this because it can get pretty complicated if you're interested in learning more about thd then gene over at audioholics has some fantastic videos explaining this but the thing to keep in mind is that the general rule of thumb is that the lower the thd the better your chances are of getting the distortion free sound up to the wattage that the manufacturer specifies now i normally recommend a receiver with no more than 0.05 percent of thd but depending on your budget then 0.1 percent might be okay since that's usually close to the point where you can start to hear distortion from the receiver alright guys so i'm sitting here editing this video and i completely forgot the third thing that you need to look for when you're looking at wattage rating and that's ohms so sometimes you might see a manufacturer show a certain wattage at 6 ohms or 4 ohms and it's important to look for 8 ohms if you're using an 8 ohm speaker because otherwise it's going to look like that receiver is more powerful than it actually is and if you are using a speaker that's lower than 8 ohms then you want to make sure you're getting a receiver that can handle less than 8 ohms all right so now let's go ahead and jump right back into the video again i know this sounds really complicated so i'm going to explain this using a real world example so let's say you want to set up a 5.1 system and your main speakers have an rms rating of 80 watts and you have about 500 to spend on a receiver so you head on over to best buy's website and the first receiver you see happens to be the cheapest it's a yamaha 5.1 channel 4k home theater receiver you scroll down to find the wattage rating and oh my god it does 145 watts rms that's perfect since that's more than enough for my 80 watt speakers right well no not only is this price way too cheap for these kind of numbers but we also need a few more pieces of information remember the two things that are most important are the number of channels the receiver can deliver the rms wattage to and the total harmonic distortion now on best buy's website it doesn't show how many channels were driven for their claimed 145 watts but it does show the total harmonic distortion which is a whopping 10 this is obviously an attempt to inflate the wattage rating and trick you into thinking it's more powerful than it is now yamaha isn't the only brand who does stuff like this with their low end equipment so this isn't a knock on yamaha raising the thd beyond 0.1 percent is a marketing tactic that manufacturers use to inflate their wattage ratings i'm not sure of the actual wattage number but i guess the actual power rating of this receiver with minimal distortion will probably be somewhere in the realm of 60 watts per channel so usually the easiest way to find out this information is to use crutchfield's website so if we google the model number of the receiver and put crutchfield after it the first google result is usually the product page on crutchfield and there it is the rxv385 so if we scroll down under power we see 70 watts per channel into 8 ohms at 0.09 thd with two channels driven all right so 70 watts isn't terrible but it's clearly not the 145 watts they claimed on best buy's website so 0.09 thd is pretty much the same as the 0.1 percent that i mentioned earlier but notice it's 70 watts with two channels driven now obviously most home theaters have at least five channels in a 5.1 setup your main speakers usually require the most power but your other speakers do require some wattage so it's better to get a receiver with more wattage so since we have 80 watt main speakers i would suggest getting a receiver that produces at least 100 watts with two channels driven which would give us some extra power for your center channel and surround speakers alright so let's say you were to buy the yamaha receiver anyway if you were to connect it to your speakers and turn it up to reference volume you will be sending a good amount of distortion to your speakers that would not only sound horrible but it would eventually destroy them believe it or not it would be better to send 100 watts of clean sound to an 80 watt speaker than it would be to send 70 watts of distorted sound so now that we understand some of the marketing tactics that these manufacturers use on their low price receivers let's try to find one that would be a better fit so if we continue scrolling down the list we see a denon x 2700h that claims to do 95 watts times 7 channels now 900 is clearly higher than our 500 budget but let's just take a look so we're not even gonna bother looking at best buy specs let's go ahead and jump straight over to crutchfield so we see that indeed it does 95 watts per channel at 0.08 percent thd with two channels driven now ideally we need at least 80 watts per channel to each of our main speakers but we still have our center channel and surround speakers while those extra few watts might just be enough to drive those other speakers during a movie so the receiver might work fine for your setup as long as you're not trying to play music at full volume through all five of your speakers at once now honestly i'd still recommend getting something a little more powerful but this will work okay for most people so considering how much we had to spend just to power a pair of 80 watt speakers what happens if you had a much bigger budget and we had some main speakers that could handle 200 watts each a center channel that could handle 120 watts and what if we wanted to do a 7.1.4 dolby atmos setup so considering the amount of power we need with this setup this is where i would usually recommend a dedicated amplifier since the built-in amplifiers in most mid-range home theater receivers don't put out that kind of power so in order to use an amplifier you need a receiver that has pre-outs this would essentially turn your receiver into what's known as a processor since it's being used to process the audio and then passes the raw sound to the amplifier so pre-outs usually consist of rca or xlr outputs on the back of your receiver for each of the speaker channels now unfortunately the denon x 2700h that we looked at earlier doesn't have pre-outs but the x-3700h does so if we look at the back of the x3700h we see a whole pre-out section which consists of rca outputs for front center surround surround back and height channels so even though this is a nine channel receiver it can actually process 11 channels which is exactly what we need for 7.1.4 dolby atmos setup and while we're looking at the x3700 let's see how many watts it can handle so if we go over to crutchfield we see that it does 105 watts with two channels driven so this isn't anywhere close to what we need for our 200 watt speakers so just out of curiosity what if we had a four thousand dollar budget to spend on a receiver well this is the x 8500h which is denon's current flagship receiver and if we look this up on crutchfield we see that it does 150 watts at 0.05 percent thd with two channels driven now this is pretty good but believe it or not we can actually do much better with a dedicated amplifier and we can spend even less money so i'm personally a fan of emotiva amplifier since they make great quality amps and i trust their power ratings so if you're trying to spend the least amount of money but still get the best bang for your buck when it comes to wattage what you could do is get a 3 channel amplifier and power your main speakers and center channels with that and then use the receiver's built-in amplifier to power your surround speakers since they don't need that much power so you could grab something like the emotiva xp-a3 which is a three-channel amp that delivers 275 watts at 0.1 percent thd with all three channels driven so this is way more than enough to drive your 200 watt main speakers and even allows you to send up to 275 watts to your center channel speaker if you need it so as you can see an amplifier can give you a lot more wattage and flexibility but most importantly it makes your speakers sound better now beyond wide edge of course there are other features to consider when you're looking for a receiver one of the most important things to look at is hdmi versions and support considering that hdmi is going to give us the best sound quality for movies and tv shows it's super important to make sure that the receiver you choose supports the latest and greatest hdmi versions so you don't have any issues with getting the best video and sound from your blu-ray player streamer or game console the next thing i want to talk about is room correction so most mid-range home theater receivers come with some sort of room correction software and a calibration microphone this allows you to connect the microphone to your receiver place the microphone in multiple seating locations in your room and let the receiver calculate and correct the sound from your speakers to match the acoustics of your room but the thing to consider when choosing a receiver is that the more expensive receivers typically have better room correction this might not seem like a big deal but it makes a pretty big difference in the sound you get from your speakers now to be fair you can use an app or your phone or other tools to accomplish the same goal but it does help to have it built into the receiver another thing to consider is the number of hdmi ports the receiver has now most modern receivers have at least five or six hdmi ports which is usually more than enough for most people but it is best to double check that you don't have too many devices and if you plan on sending video to more than one tv then you need to make sure that the receiver has more than one hdmi output this can be helpful for people who want to run both a tv and the projector and last but not least the next thing to consider are zones or smart home features so multiple zones allows you to use one receiver to power and control a completely different set of speakers in another location and smart home features allow you to stream music and control your receiver from other devices this would include things like apple airplay network support home automation and app control now honestly i don't really use any of those features but they might be important to some people alright guys i know that was a lot of information but hopefully i was able to give a few people a better understanding of home theater receivers and how to choose one now of course i didn't cover every possible situation considering there are so many variables in home theater is highly subjective but this was meant to be used as a general guide but either way i want to get you guys thoughts on this so go ahead and give me your experience and comments in the comment section if you did find this video helpful go ahead and make sure you mash that like button and if you haven't subscribed to the channel go ahead and hit that subscribe button thanks for watching guys and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Chris Majestic

Views: 592,453

Keywords: review, majestechs, chris majestic, choosing a home theater receiver, how to choose a receiver, home theater receiver, home theater, home theater setup, receiver, amplifier, home cinema, home theater system, av receiver, dolby atmos, home theater speakers, home cinema setup, home theater ideas, home theater tour, tutorial, setup, how to, guide, wattage, thd, total harmonic distortion, ohms, impedence, watts, what is thd, buying guide, best home theater receiver, best home theater system

Id: Z81QCVNyA-M

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021