“Can a current owner share feeling toward bluetooth connectivity and app management? Need something I can control reliably over BT from outside (zone 2). Distance approx 40 feet. Thank you,”
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If you have only one wall (or straight eye shot) to the receiver from your 40 ft location, then yes you can send BT music to this receiver (via Apple airplay and a strong WIFI signal, you get better distance but works like BT). This has many variables that may make your situation impossible to reach that far. I have an older house with solid walls and most likely even lead paint in the deepest layers. I can't get that far without having a direct line of sight. I recently moved the receiver to the other side of the living room wall, which is my office, to not have the receiver taking over our clean simple living room look that the wife enjoys. Read on to see what made this possible. Your best option is to do what I did and use the Yamaha phone app and WIFI from your phone to control the receiver. You can wire the receiver through LAN cable or also WIFI. As long as you have WIFI from your home network, then you can control the receiver. From their the app lets you use your phone in two way. One, like a basic remote with volume and other basic visual controls on the phone, Although, the setting menus are only visible via your TV attached to the receiver, it would be nice if the app displayed all these and you could tweak the sound, and other advanced settings, as you like. You could still use your phone as the remote but need the visual menus cast from your receiver to the TV for many advanced features. Second method is to start the receiver's built in music apps via your phone and chose your music in this manner. All the main music apps are available like; Napster, SiriusXM, Pandora, Spotify, Qobuz, Deezer Amazon Music, and my favorite, Tidal. Keep in mind these are not the full blow music apps you normally find with the above mentioned services. It's limited but still lets you sign into them and search and play songs. The other way to steam this music is through Apple airplay (I only have iPhones so not sure how this works on Android but most likely just use the BT streaming). From within the full blown music app on your phone, you can choose to stream the music via Airplay to your receiver. So since I can do everything from my phone and TV, I don't even keep the receiver's remote in the living room. Also note that because I have the device control through HDMI feature turned on, I can actually use the TV remote to send a volume control signal to the receiver via the HDMI cable so I don't even need to open the Yamaha app on my phone to adjust or mute volume. Another tip is to make sure to use the HDMI labeled ARC to connect your TV. This send all the audio from your TV's built in video streaming apps (Netflix, Hulu etc.) to your receiver back through the same HDMI cable even though it's running the signal in the opposite direction as the video signal (ARC=Audio Return Channel). This works perfect. Technology is great in these class of receivers and this receiver was rolled out 3 years ago.
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