Sometimes you find a home theater system that works well…when you can get it to work at all.  Today we’ve got a great example of that concept in the Yamaha YHT493.

The Yamaha YHT493 is an unusual 6.1 channel home theater system (seriously, I don’t see many 6.1 channel systems–it’s usually five or seven) with four satellite speakers, one center channel speaker, receiver and subwoofer.  It also offers several surround sound decoders, including Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic II and DTS.  It offers an optional iPod dock (it doesn’t actually come with it, though), six hundred watts of total power, headphone jacks, two component video inputs, one HDMI output, four stereo audio inputs, one stereo audio output, one composite video output and four digital audio inputs.

The sound on this one is great, no mistake, but I didn’t like the control scheme at all–it didn’t lend itself well to easy access, and thus, has a fairly high learning curve. And the good part here comes if you’ve got older components, as there are plenty of component and composite outputs here.  It’s not all HDMI, and that’s a welcome change.

The downside here comes with the fairly high price tag for a unit like this–it runs four hundred and fifty bucks.  It does, however, offer plenty of useful features that give you a lot of great utility, and of course, great sound.  So the Yamaha YHT493 is a pretty good buy, but you can do better in either direction.