For the price this receiver is off its tits performance wise. Got it set-up with two NS-70 fronts, a standard centre and rear surround sounds with a subwoofer. All Yamaha of course. In 5 channel music enhancement mode it's all an audiophile with realistic budget would ever need. I mean you're going pay alot of money to reproduce this quality of high power sound with some other systems. You're going to spend thousands of dollars in 2018 prices to produce this quality of sound from new equipment ***** five stars ...happy as can be

HDMIs don't pick up sound. Optical cable straight from source to CD optical input does the job though perfectly. Not a major issue for me at all.

Very nice receiver. I've always heard that Yamaha is a great Audio brand. This replaced a Sony, and it blows the Sony out of the water. Right now, I have a Boston Acoustics Micro90t speaker system connected. It made of the (1)Micro90c (center channel) (2)Micro90x (front left and right), and a (1)Micro90pv subwoofer. Now the speaker system is about 13 years old, and costs $999, so the speakers are really HQ. Pair them with this $249 receiver, and you get a great sounding system.Right now, I just have my Sony 5 disc player connected, and will be hooking up my Apple TV (2nd gen) The reason I gave the Yamaha 4 stars was because of HDMI. As you know, I would connect the HMDI cable from the Apple TV to the receiver, and connect another HDMI cable to the TV. Well on a lower end receiver like this, the HDMI ports don't grab the audio, so I need to use a Digital Toslink cable JUST to get the audio. Higher end receivers will grab audio from HDMI, but the lower end ones like this one don't As for what the unit costs, the features, sound, and ports are incredible. This is a GREAT receiver. It packs plenty of power. Even though it claims to have 100 watts er channel, I never turn the volume up that high. The volume never goes higher that -38 db, and it can go up to 16 db. VERY loud.

I can''t think of anything bad except for the HDMI problem that I mentioned earlier