Price Paid:  $300.00 from 5th Avenue

Summary:
This is a follow-up review. It's been 2 years since I bought this receiver and 1000 or so DVDs later, it still gives me trouble-free performance.

I have since added a yamaha yst 10-incher subwoofer and a pioneer sacd-dvd audio universal player to my system and the receiver took full advantage of the additions.

sacds and dvd-audio disks really bring out the best from this receiver. the resolution of sacd and dvd-audio makes you want to dump all your cds.

the handful of sacds i have since bought include chesky's blue bossa, ink and orchestral spectacular. dvd-audio disks include carly simon's we have no secrets, paul simon's you're the one, harnoncourt's 2001 new year's day concert, joni mitchel's both sides now and natalie merchant's tigerlily.

Strengths:
reliability, sound

Weaknesses:
still can't find one

Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
Warning to all Pioneer receiver purchasers: All Pioneer receiver have inopertive tone controls in any surround mode, they only work in the Stereo/Direct modes. In order to adjust the tonal balance of your surround system, you have no choice but to put an equalizer in the tape monitor path and keep that path active all of the time. This is a serious deficiency, and misleading advertising on the part of Pioneer, and possibly other A/V receiver manufacturers.

Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
Well a week after i bought the pioneer vsxd811s-s i posted a review saying that this baby gets hot easily. in fact several times it OVERLOADED. thats horrible i thought before. what i did was to re-check all my connections including the speakers hooked in it after having read some literatures about impedance matching. i discovered that it was my fault because i connected two 8 ohms speakers on parallel in each of the receivers speaker output. two 8 ohms connected in parallel will give a 4 ohms rating. the receivers reqmnts is from 8 ohms to 16 so to protect it self, it goes off when the power is pumped up. what i did was to connect the two speakers in series, giving it a total of 16 ohms, which is within the receivers specs.

I never experienced any heating after that. all i am getting now is the superb sound plus all the good features of this baBY. I really like this one because it turns a 5.1 disk into 6.1.

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Strengths:
its very low price as compared with other gears under the same category and its features

Weaknesses:
power consumption is 990 watts

Similar Products Used:
pioneer vsxd409g

Price Paid:  $299.00 from Rex electronics

Summary:
This is my first receiver and I spent 6 weeks comparison shopping and decided that the vsx d11 would be the best bang for the buck it has plenty of a/v inputs and outputs it has nice quality features like binding posts for the speaker wire and the remote looks intimidating but is layed out in an easy to use manner. I have owned mine for a little over a month and I LOVE it!

Strengths:
1. All the important decoders
2. 6.1
3. front set of A/V inputs including toslink
4. 100 watt by 6 channel
5. easy setup
6 best feature set for the Money

Weaknesses:
1. remote not backlit
2. have not been able to get the remote to control my dishnetwork 301 receiver

Similar Products Used:
none

Price Paid:  $400.00 from Ambassador

Summary:
This received does Dolby Digital EX, DTS-ES Discrete, and a host of DSPs like DTS Neo and Dolby 5.1 music surrounds, etc. Has all the amps you'll need for a 7.1 set-up, which is how I'm using it. The great thing about this is that if you do not want to go beyond 5.1, the receiver allows you to run a passive subwoofer using the back surround amps.

This receiver has none of the quirks associated associated with earlier models. For example, you can set your front speakers to large and still be able to use the sub. Funny, but earlier receivers allow you to engage only a sub when your front speakers are set to small. The dilemma,of course, is that if you have a sub and large front speakers, you have to set the front speakers to small (a waste of the capability of the fronts) just to engage the sub.

Connectivity is never a problem. It has pre-outs for all six channels and has analog inputs for DVD-audio and SACD.

The sound is full, clean and amazing. Music or movies, this model rocks.

Strengths:
Sound, intelligent control that auto-detects format (DD, DTS, Pro Logic, EX, ES). Great silver finish. Good FM reception

Weaknesses:
None as of yet

Similar Products Used:
Pioneer VSX-D506S Pro Logic
I am running this 811 with mordaunt short 904s, and matching MS center. Back and side surrounds and sub are from JVC -- the weak links in my system.