This is a review and detailed measurements of the vintage (?) Yamaha RX-596 Receiver (stereo amplifier with tuner and video switcher). It was purchased by a member from local charity (Goodwill) for US $10 plus $18 shipping. No, that is not a typo. He did buy it for just $10. It was sold "AS-IS." Shipping was likely less since the branch of the charity is local to us. If the amp in it performs, it will be the bargain of the year.RX-596 is not that heavy relative to its size and looks as modern as today's gear:Please excused the bowed sides. I have not screwed the lid in as I plan to clean it more before giving it back to its owner. As shipped, there was an inch of dust everywhere. OK, it was just 1/8 of an inch but it is more dramatic to say an inch!More on this later. Here is the back panel:Before testing, I exercised all the controls to get rid of some of the surface dust in them. That brought most of the to life but one channel was dead. I traced that to a dirty input switcher which to my pleasant surprise, it motorized! When you change inputs, a little motor turns the input selector for you allowing for very low loss input switching (as opposed to electronic ones used in AVRs today). The motorized aspect made it very hard to get into it but I managed to clean it enough for the other channel to work. Here is a shot of the inside:So many surface wires to avoid using double-sided PC Board. It also has a modular configuration to allow for different inputs using vertical cards (e.g. tuner, video, etc.).Back to its operation, even though I got the other channel working, it was noisy so I put the unit in Pure Direct and that got rid of most of the flakiness. Some remained though as you see in the review.The owner tells me this architecture/design is used in a number of Yahama units so if measurements are good, it should apply to them as well. speaking of that, I was so pleased to see such a simple design with just two output transistors and handful of components. No fancy hard to get ICs so 'should' be easy to service if broken.The controls feel super nice, something we sorely miss in new AVRs.As usual, we start with our dashboard of 1 kHz tone into 4 ohms at 5 watts:As you see, I set the volume so that I achieved a gain of 29 dB. At lower gains, the distortion was much lower. But for fairness I went with 29 dB. Performance is slightly above average:And way ahead of a number of modern AVRs:Crosstalk performance was poor, just besting our $27 amplifier:Some of this may be due to dust. In use should not be a big issue though.Frequency response was nice and flat in audible band, reaching to 80 kHz at -3 dB point:Signal to noise ratio was just decent, reaching 16 bit performance at full power:Let's get into the meat of the measurements which is power versus noise and distortion into 4 ohms:What do you know? It easily beats the NAD T758! So much lower noise and distortion prior to clipping.As you see, one channel in dark blue was complaining a bit. It complained more when I tested into 8 ohms with the first run being very bad, but this second one not so much:I don't know why I cater to some of you asking me to do more work than I want to.But here is the 10 kHz square wave:I have also overlaid the Audio Precision in loopback in blue so you can see the best case scenario in the measurement. The AP's bandwidth is set to 1 Mhz. So naturally the 80 kHz bandwidth of the RX-596 rolls off the edges. Now what? What do you learn?The used Yamaha RX-596 is a surprising bargain. It clearly shows how much we have gone backward in today's race to add channels to AVRs while reducing their performance. This $10 amplifier produces the same power as them and despite its age, performed well.If you can find a working one of this series, and can have someone clean it up for you, you will have a great performing amplifier for almost nothing.--------As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.When I asked the pink panther to pose with this amp he initially refused. He said the thing is too dirty constituting animal abuse! So I gave him a steak to bribe him and he then happily posed. I worry that so spoiled, he will ask for steaks in the future. So need to plan ahead and buy a bunch. Please help fund that byusing: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/