X
CNET logo Why You Can Trust CNET

Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Reviews ethics statement

Yamaha YHT-585B review: Yamaha YHT-585B

Its design is old school, but the YHT-585B does have a powerful and rich sound that would go well in a dedicated home theatre room.

Stuart Gibson
3 min read

Design
The Yamaha YHT-585B is a mid range 6.1-channel digital home theatre package, offering a pair of large floor standing main speakers, three rear surround speakers, a centre speaker and a front firing sub-woofer. The sub-woofer contains its own amplifier and utilises a 25cm driver for strong bass output.

7.0

Yamaha YHT-585B

The Good

Powerful and rich sound. High quality speakers. A bargain at this price.

The Bad

No DVD player in the package. Bulky looking design will not suit style conscious. Need to buy speaker stands for rear surround speakers.

The Bottom Line

Its design is old school, but the YHT-585B does have a powerful and rich sound that would go well in a dedicated home theatre room.

The silver AV receiver is a complete contrast to the black speakers. It is a large rectangular unit containing a FM/AM receiver and six 95 Watt amplifiers. The rear of the unit is well laid out with all connectors properly marked and the speaker binding posts are a high quality screw-type that allow for quality banana plug insertion. It has a total of three switched component inputs for high quality analog video connections to items such as an SD/HD set top box, a DVD player or DVD recorder. There is also a single component output for a wide screen TV or plasma/LCD panel.

Missing from the package is a DVD/CD player, so you will have to add your own to complete the system. THe YHT-585B would also benefit from the use of higher quality speaker cables, plus the rear speakers will need additional stands to place them properly at the right height in most rooms.

Features
An interesting feature of this receiver is its ability to add an iPod/MP3 player input via the optional YDS10S attachment. All the songs stored on your portable player can be played back with the power and quality that good speakers provide. Yamaha have cleverly built in a compressed music enhancer to turn your recorded iPod music into something special.

Yamaha has also included an interesting feature called Direct Stereo. It sends all music to the large pair of floor standing speakers, bypassing the internal DSP circuitry, so you can listen to CDs the way audio engineers intended.

The speakers on this system are all magnetically shielded which is important to prevent older style TVs from suffering visual distortion. This is not really a problem for modern LCD/plasma panels, but does indicate the extra effort Yamaha has gone to with this system.

The receiver also features the ability to handle component video up-conversion from DVD; this is achieved via some very advanced electronics and gives a much greater effective resolution and clarity to movies on high definition wide-screen LCDs and plasma panels.

Performance

In a word: awesome. Listening in a small room does not do justice to the full range and power of this system. It had us checking the price and thinking there was a mistake -- how can Yamaha offer all of this for AU$1499?

Setting up the YHT-585B was very straightforward once we connected our spare DVD/CD player, although note we did use rear speaker stands and better quality speaker cable as mentioned above in the Design section. The remote was easy to use.

The warmth and richness of sound that the Yamaha system produces was quite amazing and exciting. The mid range and bass output is a pleasure to listen to -- you feel as if you are right in the studio with all the musicians.

We also tested with Andrea Bocelli's "Tuscan Skies" music DVD. It was clearly portrayed and very detailed, with a seamless transition from mid range frequencies through to very low bass output via the sub-woofer. There was more than enough volume available with little or no distortion at higher volume output.

The video output of the our DVD/CD player was fed directly to a high definition LCD panel while the digital bit stream was sent to the Yamaha receiver. This set-up worked well for the equipment being used, but when utilising a more permanent player in your home, the video output should be connected to one of the switched component inputs to allow for other units to be easily selected and their video sent to a wide-screen as well.