my review of YAMAHA AVENTAGE RX-A870BL 7.2-Channel Network A/V Receiver

this post is about my new YAMAHA  AVENTAGE RX-A870BL 7.2-Channel Network A/V Receiver that I bought on AMAZON. I gave it 3 stars for "OK"

This unit sounds at least as good as the famous old 70s Yamaha monster stereos  I've had when properly configured, which wasn't exceedingly difficult to do. It's also a lot easier than the old stereos to achieve the proper levels for the best sound as each speaker can be individually configured with the program that has an EQ, distance frequency cutoff and level adjustments in manual configuration mode.

UNFORTUNATELY, I have enough issues with this unit that I will not give it anything near 5 stars, although I very much like the sound and the overall convenience of my first modern networking surround sound audio  front end enough to keep it.I trust Yamaha because they have been in the Music business a very long time and have never disappointed me like most of their Japanese born rivals.The only other brand I even considered was Harman Kardon. The Yamaha selection is better. The Yamaha  speakers with this order are a good value too, Oh, and though it is listed as a 7.1 system, it has 9 speaker connections.

The cons: #1 its the onboard software. it is woefully inadequate. it is simple to use, but has many shortcomings & limitations. A) playing files from a USB stick, you're limited to seeing and playing only 500 songs on the stick no matter how big or small the stick is. my computer from 204 doesn't have this limitation. Plus you can only be in "current selection" or "browse" but not current selection and browse. To me, what is currently playing should be automatically highlighted. And of course it has the ubiquitous phony "shuffle" mode software that has been around since CDs were invented that merely skips five songs, so after a couple days (hours when you only have 500 songs) it starts repeating the so called "shuffle" playlist. That's the biggest software fault. The rest is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO explanation for any of the many settings you can choose, not in the manual and not in the software. Once again i have a 2005 model digital camera that does batter than this. it has a button that displays  a brief onscreen description of every setting you can make in the camera. So this dual purpose dedicated AV computer by Yamaha does less with AV files than my 13 year old Pentium 4 computer does that cost less money.Shamefull!  I don't know if other brands have better software, but frankly I chose Yamaha for the sound and quality and at least it has that.

 trying to read the user manual on my phone because they don't send a full one with the unit and I lost it anyway. and I feel that the "full" manual is jumbled, confusing and leaves a lot out or buries it somewhere, such as where a lot of the controls are, specifically tone controls and the YPAO positions. i auto configured 3 YPAO listening positions but still cannot find where to activate any of them and it doesn't say in the manual how to and it is not in the setup mode.So the manual sucks and makes this unit look scary complicated to run , but it is not.

in fact for my setup , I pretty much ditched the manual and just explored the app when I finally got it on screen that is, another thing the left out of the manual. pressing the "on screen display button on the remote doesn't work at first because you have to configure the TV as well. finally I found that someplace and then got the onscreen display. i don't like the fact that, when I select a DSP mode, the whole screen goes away when I am not finished and I have to punch "on screen display" again to get it back up. A lot of GUIs are that way and I hate them and the people who made them. There is a work around. you can push the return button before the screen goes off and go back to DSP setting, so one way or another, you have to press a button to keep the screen up or get it up, which takes longer because there is quite a lag and there shouldn't be. it tells me that the processor of this unit is too small and maybe doesn't have enough memory to be as quick as it should be.

another issue I am not please with is the existence of  only 1 USB that playing files from a USB thumb drive, you cannot connect a USB splitter and connect  two things.

Networking: only one thing works for me, the Wifi internet connection. But i do not use any of the embedded  streaming music services that rely on it so I cannot comment on them. However I can comment on the fact that I could Wifi direct connect to my phone, but then do absolutely nothing with it, such as stream anything to the receiver. i also could not connect with my phone to the chrome cast plugged in back, nor could I connect my phone via Bluetooth. neither device saw the other. Also With the wifi connection, there is no option to save it, so if you go to another conx and come back again, you have to enter the password over again, which you cannot see. s o it is very basic networking without the ability to go on the internet directly from the receiver.

I have a Fire Stick, A DVD player, a VCR, my computer 's sound & video cards (hardwired via composite), A thumb drive, one 4k non-smart TV and a Chrome Cast stick connected to this receiver. All work satisfactory except the Cast stick.

Also I can't tether my phone to the USB. I don't know if it is incompatible with my phone or it is bad since I don't have another phone to test and my little tablet is missing.

Oh I almost forgot, set in "small mode" I used to (yesterday after setup) be able to select a wide range of crossover frequencies for the front presence and center channel speakers, but now the only option is 200 hz which sucks. I've been monkeying with that all day today trying to get back the full range of frequency choices and cannot. today I just stuck the speakers in "large" mode to get more sound out of them and I hope they don't blow up.

Anarchist's folly

I love the ignorance and stupidity of supposed intellectuals who embrace anarchism with the notion that government is bad and society or individuals would be better off without it.

As I've repeatedly pointed out, all institutions look great on paper and none work in reality except for the few privileged that twist everything to their advantage. So the institution isn't the problem, people are the problem. There will always be those people among us, no matter where we are, how we govern or don't govern ourselves, who will exploit to their advantage whatever system exists . Furthermore, there has to be a system if we want to keep the things we have and not go back to the caves, but even in the caves there was a system & people taking advantage of others.  In fact, government rose out of the need. In the cave brute force ruled until societies evolved and put a stop to it. A major part of that society was the need for governance, authority in disputes, etc. In fact, if you are not a fricking moron, you realize that that is why government came into being, to regulate all the assholes (us, you , I). But of course, the next step is for the assholes to take over the government and bend it to their self centered wills and greed (and bullshit the rest of us into believing they have our interests at heart). To put it simply to the anarchist: government isn't the root of the problem, you are (people). People are the government & what causes it to be unjust, bad, tyrannical, whatever. But since we are the government, there is no government without people.Therefore, if the idiotic pseudo-intellectual anarchists wants no government the solution is simple: kill everybody. So the real solution is to have a government in which the cream of society (intellectually and morally speaking) run for and win the political offices that govern us. I'm talking about people such as Noam Chomsky and other writers and thinkers and not the assorted ex-actors, attorneys, wrestlers, singers, generals, career politicians and assorted other half-wits, crooks, perverts, puppets and thieves that we have to vote for now.

The latest Facebook wannabe: CNN

CNN has gone off the deep end trying to be a social network instead of a news network. Of all the contrivances the CNN programmers have come up with to try to become a social network instead of a news network, none is so wasteful and contrived as a the The "Choose The News"  segments where people get to text in and vote for one of 3 stories to be shown in the next hour.
        One problem is that the three choices are always legitimate, important and potentially interesting news stories that all should be aired. Another problem is that they show enough teaser of each that it is obvious that all three shows are produced, in the can & ready to go. Therefore, CNN could show all 3 if they wanted to. So the whole voting for the news thing is a contrivance and it appears to me that they are actually wasting resources doing it.
           Like I said CNN has become another lame social network instead of a news one. But MSNBC is just as bad, breaking into a  legitimate, important news story with "breaking news" about Lindsey Lohan in court. And MSNBC  (I think it is MSNBC or maybe CNN? who cares) has a new motto that is so lame: "Lean Forward" that it reflects badly on the entire network every time it is shown on the screen. It basically says about that  network "MSNBC (or CNN) is run by a brain-dead idiot who thinks this stupid phrase  is a "great motto."
      I don't know how intelligent people like Rachel Maddow & Keith Olbermann can stand or could stand to continue working at MSNBC.  I'm betting that if someone collected all the brains of all the programming decision makers at both networks and turned it into fuel, there there would not be enough fuel produced to power a pissant's minibike half way around a BB.
           If you want even less evidence of intelligence at those networks,  look the Rick Sanchez debacle at CNN. Here, I am not even referring to  the "final episode in the Rick Sanchez at CNN" story in which CNN fired him apparently for making comments about Jews and calling Jon Stewart a bigot. Sanchez, to me, with his total ineptitude & good looks was obviously hired as a token Hispanic minority (still white though).     
         He was  the anchor of a CNN supposed "news", airing in the prime time 8 p.m. slot weeknights, called "Rick's List" (that was awful). The problem is, though possessing a degree in journalism, he was no broadcast journalist (more like a game show host) by a long shot.
     In fact, if Sanchez managed to have a legitimate news subject during his show, he always obliterated  it so badly with his his twisted presentation & delivery style (not taught in any broadcast school) that you either had to turn your TV off or kick it in JUST TO MAKE IT (Sanchez) STOP!
           But that was not Sanchez's fault, I mean, to me, he seemed to be just some miscast spokesmodel (I thought until I researched him) that applied for a job (or was scouted) at CNN and got it. It turns out, though, he is a trained journalist who chose to deliver the news like a (bad) game show host. But it is important, before bashing him too badly, to realize that his employer approved of his work. Indeed his rotten show had to have the full approval and backing of the programming "geniuses" at CNN (or it would not have aired), who now bring you "Choose the News" and loads of other total obfuscative crap.
     My opinion of self-described news networks doing celebrity news is in this that I wrote earlier:
    Tongue in cheek I said "Lindsey Lohan, not (Charlie) Sheen is the best example of everything wrong" with television "news".  For instance, I was watching an interesting informative story on MSNBC and they broke in with "breaking news" about her court appearance: "Judge Says Lindsey Lohan Will Face Jail Time." Good for her! I'm happy for her!"
      The "news" networks & programs need to purge themselves of this garbage (their program directors too) that they are doing for ratings & concentrate on real news. Networks like CNN show all the time that their resources are limited by virtue of the fact that they routinely completely drop coverage of one ongoing world issue to cover the next breaking one. But the real pisser is when they drop stories about the Iraq turmoil to cover a "breaking story" on MJ or ANS. So it is  unconscionable for these networks to dedicate any of their demonstrably limited resources to any celebrity (other than a blurb saying they're dead). But they go on and on with feature stories on celebrity mishaps and relegate real breaking, important news to a little text stream underneath.
      In fact, if you watch the streamer at the bottom of the CNN TV screen, the news there is nearly always more important and more interesting than whatever they are broadcasting on the main screen. What is even more frustrating about that is that you are left with more questions about the streaming text stories than the answers CNN never provides.
      This celebrity garbage should be relegated to the half- hour celebrity news programs and networks like E! E! doesn't try to be CNN so CNN, CNBC, MSNBC should stop trying to be E! (and Facebook, Twitter &UTube, all rolled up into one giant crappy ball of stupidity) Or at least dramatically curb the coverage they are giving celebrities by putting them in the text streamer at the bottom instead of putting real news there.
     Celebrity news is for brain-dead sycophants who think the celebrities are better than them and somehow more exciting, interesting & important than anything real in their lives like their children or their job, etc. News programming is supposed to stimulate these stupid people into becoming more critical thinkers by presenting them with hard news and facts about their community and the world. Instead, the networks totally break their ethical standards by pandering to the lowest common denominator of their viewing public: the celebrity hound.
     News is supposed to inform and elevate the ignorant, not travel right along side them. I know this because I have a degree and experience in journalism. All cable tv news (& most local news) today violates nearly every principle and ethic that I learned. Let these celebrity hounds have their E! network. I demand real news and don't have anything!