This one’s for Andrew, who asked me to post a photo of the back of my new receiver. I bought a new mid tier Yamaha RX-V3800 receiver for myself for my recent birthday. I scored it at a great price – they list for $1699 and I got it for $1099. I think Andrew’s mostly interested in the complexity of the back panel compared to older generations of hardware, but the irony is I’m actually using much less cabling with the new one because the HDMI ports on the far left each replace 6 cables for AV devices and 2 cables for audio-only devices. You should have seen the mound of cables I was able to pull out of my AV stack once I had this all connected. Anyway, the photo:
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Dave's Place/Metamusing 
I should have mentioned a couple of other things. First, turns out the absolute coolest new feature of the receiver is that it’s a network device, and can play internet radio (yay radioparadise!) and podcasts, and comes with an integrated service to manage subscriptions, along with a website you can register that then allows you to manage your subscriptions using a browser. This looks a bit clunky design wise but it’s an absolutely fabulous feature. I initially thought I would be buying an ipod dock to connect my ipod to the thing but turns out with the internet radio stuff I don’t need that.
It can also see network shares, ie, it can play my mp3 collection.
!!!
This is just awesome.
Third thing is, it has more speaker connections. I used to scoff at the idea of 7.1 sound, but after a few days I was off to audiosource to order more speakers. Now I have a ridiculous amount of speakers (giant center front, giant front R+L, small middle R+L, medium rear R+L, small rear center) in my house, and the sound is fantastic.
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That is pretty sweet. The NIC, and the associated features are an awesome feature.
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I think I saw something like that at NASA HQ – something about getting the tunes just right for the shuttle launch, or was it for navigation – I forget.
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