Customer Reviews:
 Good but not perfect October 19, 2007
47 out of 48 found this review helpful
When I first heard about the Digital Sound Projector from Yamaha I thought it would be a prefect solution for my family room where I do not (or cannot) run the cables to hook up rear (L/R) speakers. I pre-ordered YSP-3000 from Amazon in September 2007.
I have the YSP-3000 hooked up in my family room for more than a week now, here is the list of good and bad about the device:
The good:
-Excellent sound quality with Dolby Digital 5.1 supported sources such as my digital cable box (via HDMI interface/cable).
-Setup is easy. You ran Intelibeam from the device; in less than 20 mins you got a customized sound projecting environment. You can always tweak the settings manually but I found the auto-setting works just fine.
-YSP-3000 also functions as HDMI switch (1 output, 2 inputs) where you can switch audio/video between DVD player and cable TV without selecting input source from your TV set. That is, connect the output HDMI port off YSP-3000 to your TV, then connect your cable box and DVD players to YSP-3000. You only need to use the YSP-3000 remote to choose between DVD and cable box.
The bad:
Here is my biggest problem with YSP-3000. It does NOT support newer version of Dolby Digital TrueHD, nor Dolby Digital Plus off the box!!
I hooked up a Toshiba HD DVD player (model# HD-A30), and guess what, my audio channel on YSP-3000 became 2-channel stereo instead of 5.1. To by pass this problem, I had to hook-up my DVD player using optical audio connection as oppose to HDMI, and change the video output from HDMI to component video output. By doing so, I no longer can switch between DVD and cable using YSP-3000, and (in theory) receiving less quality image because I cannot use HDMI for my DVD.
I contacted Yamaha support, I was told that YSP-3000 does not indeed support Dolby Digital TrueHD nor Dobly Digital Plus, which have became the standard audio format for every HD DVD movie shipped out there. My Toshiba HD DVD player only offers three choices of audio output 1) AUTO (which is the one I am using, and it is recommend for digital sound), 2) PCM (which is 2-chanael, not 5.1 with surround sound, and 3) Downmix PCM, which is also 2-channel instead of 5.1.
So I have the latest Digital Sound Projector (YSP-3000), with latest HD DVD player (Toshiba HD-A30), with latest HD-DVD movies yet I cannot enjoy 5.1 sound environment without downgrading my video output from HDMI to component. That's a shame. I hope there will be a firmware upgrade in the future with either Yamaha or Toshiba devices (by the way, I already updated the firmware on Toshiba HD DVD player to v1.1, which is the latest as to date) to provide support of DD+, or DD TrueHD.
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