Bellmeister
New member
Pioneer has been fairly quiet in AV receivers for a while, and the VSA-LX805 is the swing at getting back to being a first-choice brand. It's an 11-channel flagship, which is the obvious way to do it: match the competition on channel count and tick every format box on the way past. Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, IMAX Enhanced, and Auro-3D once you've run the firmware update, which also brings the Auro upmixer with it.
Auro-3D arriving via firmware is a slightly odd thing to advertise. Either it's there or it isn't, and shipping it in an update means somebody's LX805 sat on a dealer shelf for months without it. The upmixer is the part actually worth having. It does something genuinely different with two-channel music than Atmos upmixing does, and if you already have height speakers in the ceiling it costs you nothing to try.
Streaming is DTS Play-Fi plus AirPlay 2 and Chromecast. Play-Fi gets described as sometimes clunky and that's being polite. I've had it drop a room mid-album on other hardware more than once. Having AirPlay 2 and Chromecast sitting alongside means you can mostly ignore Play-Fi, which is the correct amount of Play-Fi. No power figures or pricing in front of me, so I can't tell you whether this undercuts a Denon A1H or parks next to it. If you left Pioneer for Denon or Marantz in the last five years, is an 11-channel flagship and a full format list actually enough to pull you back, or has the ecosystem stuff already locked you in?
Auro-3D arriving via firmware is a slightly odd thing to advertise. Either it's there or it isn't, and shipping it in an update means somebody's LX805 sat on a dealer shelf for months without it. The upmixer is the part actually worth having. It does something genuinely different with two-channel music than Atmos upmixing does, and if you already have height speakers in the ceiling it costs you nothing to try.
Streaming is DTS Play-Fi plus AirPlay 2 and Chromecast. Play-Fi gets described as sometimes clunky and that's being polite. I've had it drop a room mid-album on other hardware more than once. Having AirPlay 2 and Chromecast sitting alongside means you can mostly ignore Play-Fi, which is the correct amount of Play-Fi. No power figures or pricing in front of me, so I can't tell you whether this undercuts a Denon A1H or parks next to it. If you left Pioneer for Denon or Marantz in the last five years, is an 11-channel flagship and a full format list actually enough to pull you back, or has the ecosystem stuff already locked you in?
