Yamaha DSP-Z11 review

The first amp I ever owned was a Yamaha, vintage 1978. It had 10W per channel in stereo and four controls – and one of them was on/off. Fast-forward 30 years to the eagerly-anticipated DSP-Z11. Packing 170W for each of its seven main channels and 50W apiece for the other four, it offers a little more beef than my first amp.

CPU architecture, four-zone multi-room, Full HD video and HD audio processing, and about five million other features make it a bit more complicated too. Okay, so Yamaha locked 40 of its top engineers in the lab for almost four years to create the Z11 – but do we really need such an overtly muscular and hideously complex beast? Yes we do, more than the air we breathe.

If you love music and movies and want the best AV amplifier money can buy then the Z11’s £5,000 asking price is worth every sacrifice.

In terms of features, the Z11 ticks all the boxes for a flagship amplifier at the heart of a major multi-room AV installation… then invents 100 or so more boxes and ticks those as well. This is the first AV amplifier to feature THX Ultra 2 Plus certification, which introduces a raft of new and improved post-processing modes (which frankly I don’t have room to elucidate upon?). Suffice to say, cinephiles will find much amid all the post-processing modes to admire.

The Z11’s core architecture is more like a top-spec PC, based around a high-speed data processor to which the OS, GUI, and decoding algorithms are loaded from solid-state memory (containing the upgradeable firmware) when you switch on. While this does mean it takes quite a few seconds to ‘boot up’, the Z11 is the most flexible, feature-laden and future-proof AV amp I’ve ever seen.

Taking the features list from the top, the DSP-Z11 is four-zone multi-room, fully networkable with Ethernet hardwire, HDMI v1.3-compatible with twin outputs and upscales any video source to 1080p with Anchor Bay’s finest processing engine. The video side handles 120Hz and 24Hz refresh rates for that true movie experience and you get auto lip sync.

The audio processing is fully tooled-up for every AV sound format including Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio (of course) and the power and amplification stands comparison with even the most esoteric high-end hi-fi. Indeed, I’d rate the power supply as one of the finest I have ever tested. And audio-tuning details extend to a full Rahmen construction – specifically placed metal rectangular braces that cancel out microscopic eddy currents in the chassis!

But I’m actually only scratching the surface of the features and technology developed for the Z11 – and I feel well qualified to verify that. The review sample was accompanied by Yamaha’s Terry Murphy, who sat me through a 212-page Power Point presentation before he would give me the remote control.

The sheer level of attention to detail, both in the feature set and engineering, is of the absolute highest calibre. It is eminently clear that those 40 engineers weren’t just knocking back the sake and playing Three-Card Stud since 2004. For a four-page overview of the features alone, download the Z11 Product Bulletin from Yamaha’s website – because I need to tell you what it is like to live with…

Cohabiting

So where do you start with a piece of kit like this? Buying more speakers probably. This is an 11.2 -channel amp; to max-out its abilities you are going to need two more pairs of speakers to place high and wide on the front and rear walls and another active sub. These ‘presence’ channels come into play using Yamaha’s DSP modes to expand the usual 5.1 and 7.1 sound formats. Having rustled up the requisite speakers, brackets, subs and another 40m of cable, the real suffering for your art begins.

Auto setup might have been invented to simplify initial operation but the Z11 takes setting up an AV amplifier to new levels of depth and detail. Although there is a quick setup, to get the best from the advanced YPAO parametric EQ system and to make your listening sweet spot actually a ‘sweet-area’, the beast needs to measure and analyse all 13 channels in eight different room positions – and then three times more at the hot seat. This takes about an hour of hissing and whooping noises, interspersed with having to move the mic around the room. Then you accidentally cancel the settings without saving. I did. Twice.

Assign amps, tie up the relevant video inputs with matching audio inputs, rename everything and finetune all the video processing settings and preferences.