This is a review and detailed measurements of the Yamaha R-N803 Receiver, amplifier, and streamer. It was purchased by a member (b-stock?) and drop shipped to me. The R-N803 costs US $750 from amazon including Prime shipping.
The R-N803 has AV-style features such as Room EQ but with only two channels of amplification. It has a retro look which is quite a bit nicer than an AVR though:
Alas, beauty is only skin deep. Those nice vertical controls are loose and have nowhere near the great feel of the 1970s gear with their solid mechanical selectors.
The back panel shows how the video features have been stripped away:
As a package, it is much more appealing than the monster size of typical AVR. So not a bad effort.
Internally there are decent size heat sinks, one for each channel. This is a huge step up from a shared flimsy heat sinks we see in modern AVRs with many channels. This resulted in high robustness as in my testing, nothing caused the R-N803 to shut down or go into protection mode. With AVRs it is common for them to do these things even though I still drive them with just two channels.
Receiver Amplifier Testing
I exclusively used the CD input for my testing. There is a button for Pure Direct as there is on AVRs so let's engage that and see what we get:
I set the volume control to +3 db to get the nominal 29 dB of gain. Measurements were not that different at 0 dB. I had to play fair bit to get rid of some ground loops (this is 2-pin, insulated device). Once there, I was rewarded with pretty good SINAD which is a combined measure of distortion and noise:
As you see, the ranking is way above average of just 77 dB SINAD.
Switching off pure direct mode however, causes severe performance drop:
Noise floor as moved massively up and distortion has increased. Now we are back in the poor category of AVRs. Sadly to use Room EQ you need to operate in this mode so you have a tough decision of whether you want to have low noise/distortion or room EQ.
Dynamic range in pure mode is good:
As is crosstalk:
Frequency response is excellent in pure mode as well:
Turning off pure (green) causes a sharp drop near 50 kHz which seems to indicate the input is digitized using 96 kHz sampling. It is nice that this rate is a lot higher than many AVRs use. Not so nice is the non-flat response even though I set all the controls to the middle.
There is plenty of power into 4 ohm load at lower distortion and noise than a number of AVRs:
Switching to 8 ohm load and measuring pure and non-pure modes, shows the poor performance of the latter:
I had a slight issue with this test. Just minor wiggling of the speaker terminals caused one channel to get distorted much earlier. Not sure what is going on with that.
Back to 4 ohm load, we see that we have plenty of headroom for momentary peaks in music:
And here is our power test with different frequencies:
At low frequencies approaching 20 Hz, distortion rises above 60 watts or so (orange). Otherwise, this is a predictable performance with high frequencies being a bit more distorted than low. And this is a good thing compared to nasty curves with get in some switching amplifiers.
Conclusions
As a pure, analog integrated amplifier, the Yamaha R-N803 does well. It produces ample amount of power into 4 ohm with pretty low distortion and noise. The visuals are also quite attractive. Digital mode to use such things as Auto-EQ/filters is rather poor due to similar issues in many AVRs. Sad that Yamaha did not go the extra mile and produce a better subsystem here.
I personally don't like to use an AVR as a stereo setup due to their large size and not so pretty face plate. So in that regard, I appreciate the Yamaha R-N803.
Given the good, pure analog mode performance, and nice looks, I am going to put the Yamaha R-N803 on my recommended list.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
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