Dreams
I’ve always dreamed of hi-fi and/or home cinema. Nothing overly high-end/audiophile expensive, but something serious with focus on stereo. Somehow I came to like Cambridge Audio (CA) products and was thinking about the lines of their Aero 5.1 set, perhaps without a subwoofer for the sake of my neighbours, driven by one of Cambridge AV receivers with their universal player.
Years passed, we needed other things before that, but finally the time has come to go hi-fi at last. And I decided to make it just stereo and perhaps not buy each component for 1000 Euros.
How we got here
In the meantime it got difficult to find a dealer with a listening room with tons of options – just as it got easier to order online and return in case you don’t like the stuff. Also, whatever you buy, it will probably not sound that good in your ordinary living room without any treatment. So I just betted on those Aero 6 speakers as they got cheaper over the years, for 500 Eur they would be a great deal. The online shop wrote back that they don’t have those anymore (unlike previously reported) but they have Aeromax 6 for 750 Eur – which again, seemed to be a good deal. Now how to power them?
I could go with a pure stereo receiver, even CA offers reasonably priced integrated stereo amplifiers, but I decided to go with something that supports HDMI – with all the pros and cons. While there are a lot of 5(and more).1 AV receivers, there’s not that many stereo AV receivers. Sure you can go pure audio amplifier/receiver and use optical (TOSLINK) cable from TV and you’re done. Maybe I should have done that, I don’t know.
What I bought is a slim Pioneer SX-S30DAB and now I’m going to tell you how life is with it. I will not talk much in-depth about the sound, I’m sure the linked What Hi-Fi review serves you better at that.
Slim and solid
I really like the build, feel and look of this device. It’s metal, it’s simple, boxy and flat with a couple of knobs and buttons. There is no balance on the front panel, but otherwise it has all the necessary things for people like me that like using the front panel nearly as much as (or more than) the remote control – treble, bass, input selector, volume. I like the connector for USB sticks at the front panel, somehow I don’t understand the idea of going to the rear when I need to plug something there – but perhaps it’s just me not using a big disk. There is a small headphone jack that disables the speakers which is reasonable when there is no dedicated headphone volume and/or any way to switch speakers off. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen headphones that have only 6.3mm jack anyway, so the 3.5mm jack is not bothering me.
The device has 4 HDMI ins and 1 out – plenty for me. It has only one optical input, so you can’t use it for digital CD and audio from TV for instance. I connected the CD player to the digital coaxial input, but these cables are more expensive than toslink cables. And then there is no output except for speakers, so this is the final station for your digital/audio signal, you can’t go through it into something else. It probably is not necessary for me, but some may like to connect for instance a headphones amplifier to it.
Yeah, and it has also a phono preamplifier, which I don’t need (yet!). So it actually covers a lot of bases for an aspiring hi-fi listener, especially when you want to use it also as an audio-video receiver. Sure, you’ve made the hard decision already – it’s stereo only – but it’s a solid AV receiver nonetheless. Let’s look at how it works.
Too much fun with HDMI
Nothing is perfect. My wife always waits for when I start complaining about anything I buy – and this Pioneer is no exception. Examples?
You play a CD on a blu-ray player via HDMI – hopefully you’re using something better than my old Samsung BD-E6100. It actually had to go soon after I discovered that it’s damn hot even in standby. So, you’re playing CD over HDMI while, for whatever reason the TV is on (e.g. you played with the settings). You switch off the TV and unexpectedly, after around 15 seconds, there is a short dropout in CD playback. These HDMIs somehow interact in the most peculiar way. But OK, you can get used to it and, frankly, you typically don’t turn on the TV for CD playback.
I don’t use HDMI CEC as it does both things I like and things I don’t. With CEC on if you turn off the TV it turns off the AV receiver as well (more precisely, it goes to standby). Even when I switched to non-HDMI input before. This doesn’t make sense and there is no setting option to disable this switch to standby with CEC on – this is probably not the fault of CEC itself, but of missing settings options on the receiver. I wouldn’t mind, but I’d need CEC for one thing only – TV audio return over HDMI (ARC). Without CEC you can’t have ARC.
Not a big deal really for many, often TV is just the target, I guess, but we use the TV for YouTube or USB stick playback – as it is still the best video file player in our house and respects video aspect ratio unlike our new blu-ray player Sony UBP-X700 that stretches it. So I bought an optical cable and used that single optical input on the Pioneer AV receiver for TV sound return. You need to mute the TV manually – or set volume to 0 if muting is constantly indicated on screen – why oh why. But it’s not such a bother.
Without CEC you can’t use automatic HDMI Standby Through when the HDMI is passed through to TV even when the AV receiver is off. I like this feature, but even without CEC you can set either “Last” (HDMI output) or one concrete output. For us leaving this on CBL/SAT (TV set-top box) works just fine as default as that is the most used source and we also need big sound for this one the least.
Other functions
If you ask why I don’t play video on a USB stick from this receiver… It doesn’t support video, only audio. So it will play the sound from a film, but it does not decode video. I wish it would, but it’s probably beyond its duties. Somehow I thought that with AV capabilities it would, but handling HDMIs and decoding videos are obviously separate problems.
Another funny thing is that the manual says that the “Network” diode on the front panel indicates that the receiver is in “network standby”, that is it can be turned on remotely, for instance, by Spotify Connect from your PC or via Android application. Now there is a setting to disable all these settings, but it just doesn’t work. The device stays in network standby instead of low-power standby whatever you do. Android application actually warns me that without it on I can’t start the device via application the next time – but I can. When I enable the network mode, it doesn’t warn me in the application – and that’s about the only change. I guess firmware can fix this, but I couldn’t find any simple way to report this bug to Pioneer (and, honestly, I’m a bit afraid they wouldn’t care).
Similar issue is with auto standby after 20 minutes – I just can’t make it work. While Pioneer CD player nicely turns off after a while, this unit doesn’t – and I tried everything. Settings in this regard are quite complicated, you need to combine “Auto standby when this” with “Auto standby when that” without any meaning to me as an end user.
There are good things too, of course. I like the DAB (digital broadcast) radio. There is no AM, I don’t miss it, but there is FM and DAB. I never used DAB before and there are not so many DAB radio stations in Slovakia, but the quality is significant even with quite a low bitrate as there really is no noise compared to FM.
Talking about noise – whatever the volume is set to, there is hardly noticeable noise from speakers when I’m very close to them. Otherwise nothing. While the device is not rated for audiophiles with its 1% THD, I don’t personally mind as it is a big leap for me.
Controls
I don’t miss anything in this department when I play from other sources. I personally haven’t needed balance control yet, I mostly go for pure direct sound for my CD collection anyway, but it’s hidden under AV adjust accessible with the remote.
I should mention the display. It allows you to control the device completely even without TV, although with all those HDMIs you probably didn’t buy it for pure audio anyway. But I like the touch. Sure, it’s difficult to orient in the menus, but you can use the manual which clearly describes the settings structure. But you definitely don’t want to do this without TV, even if it’s possible and the designers did a really good job with the display and the information on it.
When I wanted to play from a USB stick things got a bit rough though. Navigating the folder structure (with TV again, of course) is easy, but playing it is not that intuitive. You can’t just play whole folders (e.g. albums). And then the biggest problem is that you can’t seek in the song! This really bothered me. If you want to play Oldfield’s Amarok from the middle, you can’t do it!
The only thing that can save you (partially) is the Android application. Seeking with it is extremely imprecise but at least possible. This is what any other player I used handles much better. So you can play from USBs but don’t expect any fun here. Format support is wide, MP3 of course, but not OGG/Vorbis (quite typical nowadays), but the receiver also decodes DSD (like from SA-CD).
In overall I don’t see much added value in the app – being a tactile person, having no other devices and no groups. Only that seeking is partially useful. The app looks good at first sight, but has many reported problems (I personally didn’t care) and got bad reviews – three stars on Google Play and even two on Apple Store. So this is the part where Pioneer doesn’t shine.
Talking about networking/wireless capabilities – I definitely underuse these, but I like Spotify Connect (unlike Spotify in overall, but that’s for another rant). I can simply choose the device from the Spotify application, it turns on (remember, can’t disable that network standby) and starts playing. Volume in Spotify is connected to the device, just as pause on the remote control pauses the music in the desktop application. I like this, simple, functional, neat.
Edit 2019-04-13: I also discovered streaming from PC using UPnP AV media server standard, which worked surprisingly well for me (as UPnP it better does). I didn’t even have to use Media Player, I used my favourite foobar2000 player with UPnP MediaRenderer Output component (like a plugin). Installation was super easy, after restart I didn’t need any configuration – I could see Pioneer receiver in the Output dropdown (which I have on the foobar’s toolbar) and to my surprise I could even stream local OGG files, they were decoded and streamed as PCM.
The remote is OK – plastic with a look more from the 20th century, rather sharp edges, it has a big portion for volume control, which is good. The remote has dedicated buttons for each input if you don’t like rotary selection on the front panel.
Conclusion
Now with all those complaints you may think I don’t like the device that much. But I actually do. Sure, nothing is perfect. I don’t understand why license free OGG music format is not supported (this is not just Pioneer, there is an obvious anti-ogg conspiracy :-)). I don’t understand why you can’t seek in USB playback.
But then there are tons of things I like and it surprised me they just work. You activate pure direct mode on some input, and it’s there the next time. You set stereo/mono/surround on another, and it stays there. I like how Spotify Connect works. I like the feel of the device too, and that’s also important.
While I see the room for improvement the receiver already does a lot of stuff – it’s a network connected AV receiver, not just an amplifier, after all. In general, most of the time I have no problems with this device – one chooses the input and uses volume 99% of the time anyway.