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Pioneer brings you Susano, the Shinto god of wind and storms, now raging within the enormous enclosure of this 10.2-channel AV amplifier.
Over the last few years Pioneer has offered some quite high-end home theatre receivers, but the Pioneer Susano SC-LX90 is in a class well beyond that. It is also different in not being a receiver, but an amplifier — that is, it does not have a radio tuner built in. Aside from that, and one other item, this is about as fully functioning and capable a home theatre powerhouse as you’re ever likely to come across.
EQUIPMENT
According to Wikipedia, Susano is the god of sea and storms in the Japanese Shinto religion. This, presumably, is where Pioneer derived the name. The Wikipedia article, while interesting, doesn’t offer much of a clue as to why a home theatre amp would be so named. Perhaps Pioneer feels that this unit can whip up a storm.
That may well be the case.
Still, before getting inside the unit, I must remark upon its looks. Over the years the fashion for home entertainment equipment has changed... from a brushed-silver aluminium front panel to a brushed-black aluminium black panel… and back again. At the moment some brands offer both. The Susano is different. Its front panel — and a large one it is at that, measuring 247mm tall — is finished in piano-gloss black, simply lovely to look at, and being complementary to other products from Pioneer’s prestige LX range, including its top-notch plasma TVs and Blu-ray players.
In the middle of this frontage is a display, but not the usual LED one. Instead, it is a colour LCD screen measuring 110mm wide and 63mm tall, basically in widescreen format. This shows full menus, including the set-up one. By default this shows signal information, identifying which channels are being delivered by the source, and such things as the bit-rate for Dolby Digital, the sampling frequency of the digital sound, the dialogue normalisation setting and so on. But by using a button on the front panel, you can switch this to show the video source (so you can watch your DVDs on the screen), or the source overlaid by the signal information. This really lovely little feature is diminished significantly by the fact that it only works for analogue video inputs, not HDMI ones. The receiver is huge, heavy, and fully loaded with amplifiers. Ten of them in fact. You get five configuration options for the speakers. ‘Normal’ provides for 7.1 channels, except that the two regular surround channels receive an ‘array’ treatment, in which each gets two speakers (that means nine of the amps are used). ‘All Ch Bi-Amp’ delivers 5.1 channels, with two amps for each channel. There is no active crossover, though, so all frequencies are delivered to each driver, leaving the loudspeakers’ passive crossovers do their usual jobs. ‘Front Bi-Amp’ gives you six amplifiers for the front three channels and a single amp for each of the surround and surround back channels. Then there are two ‘7.2’ channel settings, one of which releases two of the amps for a second zone, while the other allows for a ‘B’ set of stereo speakers.
Each of the amplifiers offers 140W, and Pioneer says that the receiver can deliver maximum power from all of the channels at the same time. The amplifiers use Bang&Olufsen’s IcePower technology, which is a particular type of digital amplifier. That allows a lot of power to be generated with high efficiency, reducing wasted heat.
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