Pioneer VSX-D514-K 5.1-Channel A/V Receiver

Rating:
Summary: Some information...
Review: I've only had the receiver briefly, so this is not intended to be a full review.

The D514 is the lowest receiver in this line of Pioneer receivers. The manual refers to a D414, too, but that does not appear in the Series brochure, so may be a non-American model.

I tend to like to buy the lower end of a product line, since they tend to have many of the same internals as their more expensive brothers, but with fewer features. Accordingly, the D514 has the smallest and lamest remote control of the family and it has no front a/v inputs. I don't care about any of that. It does lack 6.1 channel sound, however, which its brothers provide. I really don't know whether 6.1, or even 7.1, will become some future standards, so rather than pay almost twice the price just for a feature which may or may not be useful in the future, I decided to buy this extremely inexpensive receiver and take my chances. In fact, since my sofa is against the wall, I have no place to mount the extra speaker, which is the "rear center" anyway.

Otherwise, the D514 has the same specs as the D814 and the D914, while the D1014 is in a different class (with a much superior Direct MOSFET design and far lower THD).

Like its brethren, the Pioneer has plenty of power. I also have a Harman Kardon a/v receiver and this thing is its equal in power. I partly went for Pioneer because a friend of mine has some beautiful Pioneer a/v equipment powering some monstrously ineffecient behemoth fronts and rears, and Pioneer tends to do amps well, in a way Sony, Denon, Onkyo, and others disappoint on, despite their misleading "watts per channel" ratings.

It does have two sets of component video inputs, which is useful: one for the progressive scan dvd player and one for a (future) hdtv cable/satellite box. It also has two digital coax inputs and one digital optical input. Frankly, I wish it had two opticals and one coax, because I find more and more dvd players and set top boxes have only optical outputs. I hadn't really thought of this before I bought it. Heck, if I have to in the future, I'll buy a cheap dvd player which has coax, if I need that optical input.

Setup was easy, so I could configure my system: telling the unit which speakers you have and don't have, and what sizes they are, and what distance you sit from them, all went very quickly and was logical. High marks. Low mark for the old looking display -- an old LED ticker tape style. But at least the unit is not flashy.

Another thing that may be important to you: while this Pioneer has 5.1 inputs (in case you want to add a different decoder box for, say, an SACD decoder or something), it nevertheless does not have (RCA style preamp) outputs, except for a subwoofer. This affected me because my large screen Toshiba TV allows you to use its internal speaker system as an excellent center channel by flipping a switch and plugging in a single RCA cable from an a/v receiver's "center channel" rca-style preamp output. But this receiver has not such output -- only the speaker output-- so I cannot take advantage of that feature.

One final point: I can see into the unit and there is plenty of space inside it. On the one hand, that pleases me because I think it aerates and cools better, but on the other hand, I was surprised that this unit is so much lighter than my older Harman Kardon which is a heavy son of a gun. Thought you might want to know that.