Specific details of how their solution is to be implemented are still thin on the ground, but the HDMI board replacement that they have announced is certainly more elegant than Sound United’s Denon and Marantz’s external box solution.

The replacement HDMI board will be a free upgrade, provided that owners who require it take up the offer within 24 months of it officially going live, currently estimated to be autumn of 2021.

The receivers that are impacted by this upgrade are the RX-V4A, the RX-V6A, the RX-A2A, the TSR-400 and TSR-700. All owners are advised to ensure that they have registered their receivers with Yamaha to ensure that they receive future updates regarding this upgrade rollout.

In reality many owners of the above AVR’s will not be affected by, or require this upgrade solution. This is because the current HDMI boards can handle the vast majority of sources with no problems at all. Only owners of the Xbox Series X or NVIDIA RTX30 graphics card will require this upgrade in order to pass through native 4K signals at 120Hz.

The HDMI board replacement is not one that can easily be handled by the average AVR owner. So those who choose to have the upgrade performed will have to go through the bother of either sending in the AVR to a service center or potentially have an engineer visit their home. We will have to wait and see what the final upgrade path offered by Yamaha looks like.

Neither of these upgrade options are ideal for the consumer and will be expensive for Yamaha to implement. However, at least Yamaha has taken this issue seriously and provided a clean and elegant upgrade path to resolving it, especially when compared to the Sound United external converter solution.

More details to follow as they unfold.

See Yamaha for further details.

See my HDMI 2.1 Bug posts for Denon and Marantz.