Yamaha RXV-850

Raynald

Addicted Member
A bit of a beast. Not their best era of course, but compared to a lot of the BPC around then, it was only B. Huge transformer, big discreet outputs for the main amp with pre/main couplers so it may have potential as a power amp.

Found this one locally, which is good because it weighs a hefty 32+ lbs. Basically in nice shape but it looked sad as it was very dusty and missing its feet. Cleaned up nicely and Karma kicked in as last week I picked up a whole Yamaha/PSB/Paradigm HT set up with a RXV-392 that goes into protection and shuts off as soon as it is turned on. The feet are a perfect fit!

Before taking it home I checked the DC offset, 25mv one side, about 5 the other. A very quick test showed sound came out of both channels. After getting it back together I tried the tuner section with headphones and everything seems fine. Will hook it up to speakers and report back.
 

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Gave a quick listen on the PSB 600i that I got with the HT system (not bad at all by the way, but maybe that's for another forum) and not what I expected.

I sort of feared it might be a little bright and gutless. Well I checked a couple of times to make sure the bass extension was not on or that some HT/DSP mode was not engaged because this thing has tons of bass and a very full sound. Nice surprise. Tuner section seems decent, good enough to pull in several stations in the basement. Nowhere near as sophisticated as my RX-1130 tuner section. That one has a tuner board about three times as big, fine tuning like the T-85, Wide and Narrow IF bands, all of which can be stored in memory. No competion there, but the 850 is a good sounding unit. Perhaps the same main amp as my DSP-A1000 has for the fronts and center. I use those just as power amps in my HT set up and they are pretty good.

Anyone spot the second transformer in the back of the 850? Nice touch, maybe to run the digital processing?
 
Nice report on the 850. I suspect that more of those vintage HT receivers actually sound pretty good, even with the obvious cost cutting of the time. I have an old Denon HT receiver, and as I recall, it sounded pretty good with my setup. Maybe I'll open it up and have a peek at the layout.
 
No surprise your Denon sounded good. I used to sell both Yamaha and Denon in my retail days and when HT began to take over they continued to make an effort to get the audio side right. They really did sound better than the vast majority of the "how many buttons and RCA jacks can we get on one box" receivers the competition was pushing. NAD and HK made some better sounding receivers but they just did not offer what most people wanted, or thought they wanted/were told they wanted, on the HT side of things compared to the others.

I remember the RXV-850 from those days but could honestly not remeber what it sounded like. New models wer coming thick and fast so we did not always get a chance to get a handle on some before they were gone. Nice to know I was selling good stuff!
 
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