VSX-94TXH Home Media Gallery and Video Bench Testing

The Home Media Gallery is an interesting concept that is implemented about as good as the User interfaces for the first generation high-definition DVD players. That is to say, it's slow and clunky. Navigating around the system to access various areas is slow and tedious, with cursor actions being delayed from actual on-screen responses by around a full second. Even the User Manual is an add-on of sorts, coming as a separate pamphlet about 18 pages in length. In short - it needs some more work.

OK, now the good stuff. Setting up the Home Media Gallery was a snap. If you have a basic home network with a router sending out an IP address via DHCP you'll spend about 20 seconds getting the system ready. The only other thing to note is that the Pioneer HMG uses WMDRM (Windows Media Digital Rights Management). This means that you'll need to add the Pioneer HMG to Windows Media Player's allowed devices (under the Library tab in Options.) Once that's done, just go through the Setup menu of the HMG by selecting Setup and hitting 'Enter' on the remote. From here select Network Setup. If you have DHCP (most common) then select Automatic (DHCP). That's really about all there is. If you use static IPs or anything fancy then you can tweak your own way manually through the Setup - we won't cover that in this review.

Audioholics/HQV Bench Testing

Perfect Score is 130
VSX-94TXH Benchmark Score: 76

The VSX-94TXH was sent 480i via component from a Denon DVD-1930CI.

Comments on Bench Testing

We wanted to see if the Faroudja DCDi video processing performed as expected when upconverting standard definition video to the HDMI outputs. The only surprise was the slightly blurred Color Bar test results. The EOL vertical pattern just didn't have the punch we're used to seeing, though it didn't seem readily apparent in the Detail test that any resolution was being lost. The final score shows that the DCDi processing is doing its job and you can feel pretty good about sending standard definition video through this AV receiver.

HD Audio Support

Because the Pioneer VSX-94TXH supports HDMI 1.3a and nearly all that the spec entails, you can know that if you feed bitstream Dolby TrueHD or dts-HD Master Audio into the system, it will be decoded correctly and fed to the speakers in pristine high definition. Your toughest job will be finding a high definition Blu-ray player that can send out the audio natively. Fear not, though, as 7.1 channels of uncompressed PCM will sound just as good. Also remember, that no matter what the digital format, all audio sent into the AV receiver via HDMI will be properly bass managed by the system.