[BobBehr]

Man, I remember all those posts about the never ending praise of the new Pioneer Elite VSX line,and how fantasmagorical it was.
OK,new kid in town! Yamaha. Not just a simple graphic e.q. but a parametric e.q. along with Yamaha's own LSI's.Could YPAO really be better than the allmighty MCACC??
Has someone out there any experience and comments on direct comparisons 'tween the two systems??

[Don Barduca]

I have spoken with a couple dealers that sell both brands and if you are comparing strictly the Auto EQ features then I would say the Yamahas should have a slight edge in real world calibration. The two dealers I spoke to said that YPAO performs equally as well as MCACC, but not better. As I said above you would think YPAO would perform slightly better so maybe others can comment.

[NickSP]

I have the 1400 and have been very impressed with what YPAO has done with respect to room corrections in my listening area. However, this is a very dificult test because both those receivers need to be present at the same location under same listening conditions. Anything else will be just a matter of I like YPAO over MCACC because of blah blah .....

[BruceD]

The biggest issue seems to be what Yamaha's YPAO is really doing, as we know Pioneer's MCACC is only a graphic EQ and not parametric.

Yamaha's YPAO (the parametric EQ portion) has hard coded center frequencies and doesn't provide any information on what the the width of the filter (the "Q") actually is. I assume some of these same center frequencies are used by the graphic EQ portion of YPAO.

As an example, if the "Q" of the parametric filter has a width of 1/3 octave, then it is really acting more like a graphic EQ or tone control (which is what Yamaha probably uses for it's graphic EQ portion) than a true parametric EQ filter.

A parametric filter with a "Q" precision to 1/60 octave as well as adjustable center frequencies would be preferred, but at least Yamaha has made a start.