In-depth hands-on review: Pioneer SC-LX82 THX Ultra 2 Plus AV receiver

Pioneer blasted back into the AVR limelight last year with its SC-LX81 AV receiver, which went on to win Home Cinema Choice’s Best AV Receiver/Amplifier over £1,000 Best Buy Award last April. Now the brand is back with an update in the shape of the exciting SC-LX82.

This is a heavily-laden model with a strikingly shiny back finish, and carries over the prestige THX (here in Ultra2 Plus guise) and the AIR Studio imprimaturs from its predecessor.

The former is a yardstick of high-end home cinema. While THX has more to do with spatial dispersion and the way that acoustic power is generated than audio sound quality, it remains a hot badge for hardcore AV fans; the latter, proprietary to Pioneer, means that the receiver has been sonically fine-tuned at London’s prestigious AIR Studios, which has had a long term association with the company.

Other sound quality-related elements of the LX82 equation include a very clever Full Band Phase Control, which linearises the phase and overall time alignment (group delay) of the system; this is especially important at low frequencies, where the audibility of the problem is most acute. It also has a proprietary auto level control, which prevents adverts blasting out mid-programme, or when switching to MP3, sets out to match what Dolby Volume achieves, though it doesn’t appear to be as smart as the Dolby system and at the end of the day it remains what it doesn’t explicitly own up to on the tin – a compressor. Maybe Pioneer just wanted to save on licensing costs?
iPod conectivity
The LX82 has LAN and USB interfaces so you can connect it to your home network, and listen to internet radio, while DLNA certification is designed to share digital content across a network. The Pioneer also has a number of technologies intended to drag MP3/ATRAC codecs kicking and screaming into the age of high-fidelity, but you can’t turn a low bitrate sample from a lowly iPod into high-resolution audio, no matter how fancy the electronics, or fanciful the claims.

All the surround sound processes are present and correct, up to and including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. The video sub-sections are compatible with HD in all its wonderfulness, including 24p, and there is a plethora of HDMI ins and outs, which use anti-jitter technology. Jitter – a measure of uncertainty in the time domain – is one of the major factors that militates against good audio quality across HDMI, and is addressed here with a technology called PQLS, which collects digital data at its final point (the receiver in this case) and meters it out with a locally-generated clock.

A similar technique was adopted years ago with Firewire, but I feel it is only a partial solution to a difficult, multifaceted problem, which should also take account of conductor and dielectric quality, screening, and the mechanical properties of the connectors.

But believe it or not, this is only the start of what turns out to be an extensive roster of features. This is a 7.1 channel amplifier (of course) in which the main front speakers can be bi-amplified if channels six and seven are jettisoned. This is no longer unusual, but it should be considered by anyone who wants to make serious use of the SC-LX82 for quality music replay.

First impressions
I used the Pioneer's early generation flagship VSA-AX10 for an extended period, and found it to be very good. It was very well equipped, and was one of the first of its kind – the absolute first if I remember correctly – with a properly worked-out microphone-driven room equalisation system, though it is unlikely if it would compete with more modern equivalents such as Audyssey. The process used here – Advanced MCACC – belongs to the more modern and sophisticated school, and will give you a more finely -tuned and consistent result, especially with speakers that are not fully voice matched. But again there is only so much that it can achieve, even with phase matching.

But I remember that the VSA-AX10 ran very hot, and that when under duress, or if it was allowed insufficient ventilation, it would sometimes shut itself down until it had cooled off. The problem was that it was so bulky, and it was quite difficult to cool. The solution that Pioneer has adopted is perhaps a little surprising; it no longer uses its own amplifiers, but buys them in from Bang & Olufsen, or rather the wholly-owned subsidiary ICEpower, which specialises in Class D amplification.

It took a while to get to grips with the LX82 on audition, but eventually a fairly consistent pattern emerged. Let’s start with PQLS, which has already been mentioned. From my experience, the surest way to kill the sound of CD stone dead is to feed the audio data across an HDMI link, and the jitterless interface was tried using the specified Pioneer BDP-LX52 Blu-ray player which supports multi-channel PQLS.

I made the point earlier that jitter is just one part of a multifaceted problem, and this was apparent before these comments were committed to paper. Although HDMI in this case appears to redress some of the problems, it still didn’t sound transparent to these ears when compared to a conventional two- or five-channel audio feed across a single-ended interface (i.e. using the phono in and outputs).

Dogs's dinner
HDMI has some useful properties: it’s easy to wire up, and undeniably convenient, but technically it remains what it always was – a dog’s dinner. PQLS is a step in the right direction, but it remains threadbare and not entirely natural. It also suffered from occasional losses of individual channels using cables that in other situations worked well. Perhaps the driver or receiver was working the cable too close to its limits, which is often an issue with HDMI.

I also remain undecided about the ICEpower implementation. The amplifier is clearly very clean, and it generates plenty of raw power, but it has a leanness and loss of transparency that did not go unnoticed. Clearly it pays its way by allowing the amplifier to run cool, and it can be driven hard without any changes in voicing or less of control. But on this showing I would rate ICEpower a second rank solution.

In fairness, very few Class D amplifiers do much better, the obvious exception being a much, much more costly two-channel only solution, also Scandinavian, but this time not from B&O – the Lyngdorf Millennium. But there are signs that it works more comfortably in a home cinema context than pure music. For the record, there's plenty of juice on tap in the 7x190W design.

Most of the other features of the LX82, however, perform to a high standard. The video side, for example, looks wonderful using a Sony 200Hz screen, with movie replay from the matching Pioneer LX-52 Blu-ray player and material that included Vantage Point and Quantum of Solace. It is also a strikingly good surround sound receiver, for example in the opening crowd scenes in Vantage Point , which are very realistically encoded in Dolby TrueHD.
In every case, the sound was immersive and powerful while leaving speech unmolested and intelligible. Even some of the smaller details impressed, a good example being the graphical user interface, which is amongst the best I have seen: uncluttered, attractive and easy to follow.

Conclusions
I’m not entirely convinced that all the high-tech elements of the LX82’s design serve to enhance the final result as much as some fans of the brand might hope. Saying that, this is undeniably an AVR which is prodigiously powerful, well-equipped and relatively easy to use.

Following my audition, this receiver has been passed over to Chris Jenkins in the HCC Tech Labs for evaluation and from there is scheduled to travel to my colleague Richard Stevenson for more testing. To see what they make of this fascinating and powerful piece of kit, check out their reports in an upcoming issue of Home Cinema Choice.