Yamaha HTR-5890 or Technics SA-DA8

Montycat

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I have had a Technics SA-DA8 for 10 years or more, but I will be picking up a Yamaha HTR-5890 (FREE!) tomorrow. Of course both of these are old school as HTR devices now but for my purposes I don't need state of the art. Neither have HDMI for example. As far as I can tell the Yamaha is about 3 or so years newer.

The Technics always sounded fine but some aspects of switching always annoyed me, like from analog to digital sources for example.

Both have more than enough power and inputs including Phono. The Yamaha has 140w/ch as opposed to 100 for the Technics, and it has more digital inputs. But I don't need the extra oomph or 7 channels either.

I think I will like the looks of the Yamaha. It's silver for example, but it is also a bit bigger so hopefully fits my cabinet. If it doesn't I might have to move my main audio rig off the top and put it there. But if the phono stage and 2 channel sound are good, maybe I can live with that as the audio rig too. :scratch2:
 
I think you are going to like the Yamaha sound and the extra oomph and extra codec handling like THX and DTS ES-discrete doesn't hurt one bit, just think of it as extra resources you will have at your disposal.
 
I'd have to say to go with the Yamaha in a heartbeat. It's a more expensive receiver that also benefits from years of home theater receiver development.

Examples; it has Selectable Subwoofer Crossover to better match your speakers, Room correction (make sure that the setup mic is included), multichannel inputs which would give the possibility of using it with an HDMI receiver (with preamp outputs) if you ever upgrade. Finally it likely has better D/A converters than the Technics.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have owned neither brand home theater receiver and therefore have no opinion on the sound quality.
 
I did pick it up yesterday and look forward to using it. What I don't look forward to is hooking it up as I have quite the rat's nest back there. Maybe that will be my Christmas time off project.

It is complete which is nice. Manual, remote, antenna, YPAO microphone. He put it in the box of his new HDMI equipped Yamaha.
 
I had a Technics SA-DA8 and a SA-DA10, in analog mode I think they sound pretty good, it has ICs instead of discrete output devices so some may say it's not that good. The SA-DA10 had special bamboo main power capacitors with copper top and some other improvements which is nice (check the pics). I have a Yamaha HTR-5940 right now, I think the internal amplifier design in your 5890 is quite a bit different from mine but I find no fault in the Yamaha either.

I don't like the digital decoder in the Technics, I think it sounds dry and lacking in imaging in 2 channel mode when I switch from analog input to digital input. In 5 channel mode it seems to be good. I was using a Pioneer DV-333 as a CD player (which was quoted to have excellent analog audio output), it's a little plastic player that works pretty well.


I'd use the Yamaha for home theater and the Technics for a 2 channel setup with its VGCA mode turned on.
 

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Zombie thread!
Saw this and had to chime in for anyone looking at old receivers.

I have a Technics SA-DA10 and it wiped the floor with my similar Yamaha HTR-5740.

Driving Energy Pro 22s, the Technics has way more volume on tap than the Yamaha
1/3rd Technics Volume = 3/4th Yammy Volume for the same level output.
It seems like it provides better current to the power hungry Energy speakers.

The killer feature the Yamaha's have is the room correction, but a lot of room issues can be mitigated with placement/treatment anyway.
The SA-DA10 does have crossover handling; thought not as flexible as the Yamaha.
They both handle surround well, but I never really used a lot of the extra crap the Yamaha had built in.

Internally, the Technics also has some really nice capacitors, a huge transformer, and most importantly a good sounding phono stage, but it does run hot all that being said.
 
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