Clear true sound, seperation & reliability.

No DTS or DVD-A inputs (allthough at time of manufacture no dvd's required or had these features).

Puchased this unit when dvd's were still in their test marketing phase (I forget the exact year & month but divx wasn't even out yet & the yen collapsed). Built my own subs & speakers (the tweeters are 'Peerless' & woofers mids & crossovers is from a small CDN company that has been eaten up by a bigger Co 10 years ago. I matched them against JBL studio monitors at a studio I was learning at in the 80's & everyone thought they were somewhat better). I have a Yamaha A-700 Amp(again an 80's item) running the subs & it's the best I've heard (for subs) anywhere. The Pioneer is excellent no frills Dolby Digital with outstanding seperation & sonic qualities. I listen to all types of music (in a minor studio you can be recording a heavy metal band while having jazz band waiting for their turn in the lobby & a country band up after them) but I'm most comfortable 70's,80's rock which sound the best in the 'jazz'(small club) setting. Never really any problems (Rammstein ate my tweeters three ago) & EVERYONE 'freaked' from the sound I got out of that system. As the years went on I got into Dvd-Audio which sounds excellent on ac-3 tracks but not all these disks carry a Dolby Digital Track. So sadly I relegated this as my second unit and bought a new 2002 Sony with dts & dvd-a inputs. For straight unprocessed DD signals the Pioneer still sounds better, tried to run it as a sub amp but it didn't even come close to the yamaha-nothing has(the Yamaha has been on it's last legs now for 6 years & i've tried many different amps).

Similar Products Used:

It replaced a home built Dolby Pro Logic system that required three different amps.

Clean Power! The Dolby Digital is just superb! I've got this baby on a Bose AM-7 (front) and Bose AM-3 (rear),along with an APS 1000 Subwoofer. Yes the price is there but so is the quality. Kudo's to you Pioneer for another fine product!

good surround sound

poor tuner section

it cost me 700 ,i have had it for eight months.it sounds slightly bright in the treble sometimes.i'm using older ads two way speakers however,there probably is a better match.lots of power,clean and very revealing in surround modes.for anyone looking this is a good receiver for the price.

Before I purchased the Pioneer VSX D906S, I read quite a bit about how great a value it was, given the features included. I bought my first one in August '97, it worked for about one week, before the power supply gave up. Thinking it might just be a singular piece of defective equipment, I returned it to the store and replaced it with an identical model. This one lasted for 5 weeks before the same problem occurred. At that point, I considered that all that value for such a great price was probably to good to be true. I would not recommend this product to anyone. In any case, I never really got a good chance to make a comprehensive review of the receiver

Excellent amplifier stage.

Little flexibility with built-in crossover.

This review is shorter and less specific that most I write, but I just recently aquired this product and have not had enough time with it to be more concise.

I just bought this receiver off of ebay for a very low price. I could not resist simply because I have heard good things about the amplifier. I am not dissapointed, very clean with good dynamics. It's a very nice Dolby Digital decoder too, but I wish that it had DTS in addition. I like the internal crossover, but the screwy guys at Pioneer decided to limit your choices. You can select a crossover frequency of 80, 100 or 150....the one you choose is automaticly applied to all speakers that you have specified as 'small', but you can't mix and match different x-over frequencies. Also, if you choose 'Large" main speakers you can not get the subwoofer to output in stereo mode. But this doesn't bother me really, I find that even with my towers..it is best not to send the bass to the towers and the sub simultaneously, this results in inaccurate bass that is very annoying, and just not a very pretty thing at all. I find 80Hz to be just fine, besides...this allows for less intemodulation distortion due to the narrower band of frequencies that the woofers in my towers have to respond to.

I purchased the Vsx906 a couple of months ago in order to convert my stereo system to surround sound. In recent years movie-watching has become as big a use for my stereo system as simple music listening. The unit works fine, but....1.the owner's manual is simply the worst I've ever read. I encountered about 20 problems w/set-up that were not addressed in the manual, forcing me to call Pioneer and wait on hold forever to get the answer I needed.
2.Though the unit is designed to be used for audio as well as video use, the only way a subwoofer can be connected to the unit for music playing is using speaker wire through the B speaker outputs and then using both A & B speakers simultaneously. In Dolby Digital, the B speaker outputs are turned off, and only the RCA to RCA patch cord connection can connect the subwoofer. Yet, if you use Dolby Surround or Stereo, the RCA subwoofer output is turned off!!!!!
Is that stupid or what? I'm going to make a custom A/B switch so that I can connect my subwoofer both ways and use a switch to select the working output. But I shouldn't have to do that. Don't the boneheads at Pioneer realize that not all outputs from this receiver will be Dolby Digital?
3.I'm a hard-core audiophile from way back, and I've connected hundreds of components, yet several aspects of the component connection to this unit were not easy, and would confuse a beginner.
So, though the unit works fine, its idiosyncrasies and poor owner's manual keep me from recommending this unit to others. Spend the money to have the store install it, or buy another unit. That's my recommendation.

This Receiver is probably one of the Worst Receivers i have ever seen. The Receiver has a poor Power Storage Explosion Chip. (used for saving amp power for a huge power surge). the receiver had done very poorly when i was watching the rock. the Receiver had probably the worst Decoding. the Channels weren't even that discrete. the Front Channels Seamed to be getting some of the Center Channel's Information (even in Wide Mode). The Receiver probably never even sent the right information to the Surround Channels. In Dolby Digital the Sound Was Good but sounded like a Pioneer Elite Dolby Pro Logic Receiver. The Channels didn't have good seperation and the Rear Surrounds had probably the Worst Trebles. i have 2 Eosone RSF-600 Speakers For Front

Excellent dynamics. Continous high-current amplifier stages.

No DTS.

Ok, this is my follow up after a total of about 4 months of use.

The VSX-D906S is a great product, one of Pioneer's best standard line items. Only the D90x series come with the high current design though, except this year one of the $800 70X series has a high current amplifier stage. Kind of strange, another of the 70x series uses Pioneer's crappy 'hybrid' ampflifier design and all of the 80x use the worthless hybrid amp. I'de like to know just how they decide the series numbers. LOL.

Some people are complaining about having to turn the volume up to high....well....it's a linear taper pot, not a log pot. Most recievers use a logirithmic pot that decreases resistance every set proportionate distance, this makes volume increase earlier when turning the volume but also makes the output distort little more than half the distance to the end of the rotatable distance. Pioneer just happens to use a linear pot that makes you turn the volume knob further, but also it does not distort unitl almost the very end of the rotatable distance.

Oh, as it seemed the prior poster was directing his statment towards me about the sub out, etc:

Have you ever tried using a seperate high quality sub with your mains crossed over activley? It does not matter what quality the mains are, when you reduce the range of frequencies you reduce intermodular distortion, and the mids are signifcantly clearer without recieiving low bass and forcing the woofers to respond to high mids and lows simultaneously and dynamics are also increased. Now if you have large mains with say 10" woofers I guess you can't really understand unless you are able to bi-amp those mains which is usually only common on very expensive loudspeakers. But with towers using 7 or 6" mid woofers it makes a huge difference in music whether you have a cheap pair of Polks or a set of expensive Dynaudio Contours. Small woofers are too fast for low bass, it sounds wrong(unnatural) even though a flat response can be achived to 40 Hz or so. And no "boominess" is possible if you put some effort into picking out a good sub such as a Velodyne, etc and remembering to use the crossover in the reciever...only a very well balanced and natrual sound reproduction is possible then. Now if you are going to buy one of those $200 Sony subs you will probably be sorry if you try to actually use it with music, that is unless you don't mind mushy bass.

I listed no DTS as a negative, but really since DTS is not common on DVDs even today I have not actually missed this feature 'yet'.

I recommend you leave at least 9" over your reciever clear of anything so that it can cool properly. The 906 is truely a high current amp and it will run very very warm even when it is used at very low volumes. If your warranty is up, you may want to replace the power cord with a much larger one. Please only do this if you use a high value resistor and discharge the power supply caps first and know what the heck you are doing to boot.

I listed 5 stars for both ratings seeing as how I only paid $254 for this baby and it's performance is typical of $1000+ recievers. And of course it can't compete with component power amps, but it's not meant to!

Can't fault it! No probs setting it up, sounds great, solid build quality. Even my girlfriend makes positive comments about "All this Surround-Sound malarkey!" now! The only reason I can feel to upgrade is to get DTS, and I'm in no great hurry.
Of course there's better out there, but you have to spend the money...
I've read a couple of reviews here from people who also own hi-end 2 channel kit who slate the 906.
All I can say to them is what do they expect?
The various 2 channel amps that are being compared are easily 4 or 5 times the cost of the 906, of course they are going to be better!!!
For the money, the 906 is pretty hard to beat and has been the best upgrade in my system so far.

Bought the Pioneer for about $730 delivered, nothing came close to it in price!!I was thinking about the Denon 3200 and the Onkyo 838 BUT I would have to sleep with the damn thing to justify the added cost. I love music and home theater but com on, the thing is off about 98% of the time anyway.

Versatility, and PRICE, PRICE, PRICE...you can beat it!

Don't care for the remote, but nothing's as bad as my toshiba DVD remote, THAT THING SUCKS!