Offering a myriad of features to tempt you is the YSP-4000 (pictured above) from Yamaha. An upgrade of the previous YSP-1100, the new edition gets better than the best. Forty individual "beam" drivers that have individual amps, and two midbass speakers, but the icing belongs to HDMI pass-throughs, and analog/720p/1080i upscaling to 1080p. The speakers are coordinated by a DSP, and by tweaking delay and volume, credibly extract sweeping surround audio that seems to come from all four corners. There are "seven Cinema DSP programs (three movie, three music and one sports)" and "Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Pro Logic II and DTS Neo:6," all of which are selectable via the remote and on screen display or LCD. The YSP-4000 is iPod and XM ready as well. The lineup also features YSP -3000 and YSP-900, which only have 21 beam drivers, two midbass speakers. The YSP-3000 has 2 HDMI inputs/outputs, but no analog upscaling and is iPod/XM ready. Similar to the YSP-4000, you’ll still need a subwoofer to go along with these.
The YSP-4000 is for $1800, the YSP-3000 is for $1,199.95 and YSP-900 is for $899.95; all will be available in August.
