The heart of any serious home entertainment system is a burly A/V receiver that acts as central command for all the connected components. Thanks to this receiver's Dynamic Discrete Surround Circuit-HD (DDSC-HD) technology, all of your audio content can be accurately reproduced over 7 channels. There's plenty of room for DVD players, game consoles, HDTVs, external speaker systems, PCs and more to get hooked up, and a host of technology enhancements provide exceptional video and audio performances.
Excellent for the most part. Some glitches one can live with
Strength
With the appropriate Denon DVD player you can use D-link to pass SACD signal to the AVR for decoding and even DSP if 2 CH SACD. Everything else can be connected though an HDMI cable. Make connections clean and simple.
I've a bit of experience experience manually setting up 5.1 AVR and also with room EQ. Although I've had good results manually, auto set up and auto room EQ features produce better results than I've ever been able to do manually. It's almost a shock how good a pair of 25 year old KEF bookshelf speakers used as the main L+R speakers sound after the auto setup and EQ. I was able to configure all the sources I needded to work the way I wanted.
The ProLogicII is so good that I've left it as the default for all the surces. In the past, I found DSP interesting for a while while listening to 2-channel material but ultimately I disable it and leave 2-ch as 2-ch. I think with this unit I will be sticking with the PL-II.
Weakness
The remote unit sucks. I can do everything that needs doing with it but it is not "remotely intuitive". Very dorky in fact. Probably this is because the AVR has far more features than anyone will use. If I could get the same basic functionality without multiple zone and "modes" life would be much simpler.
Somewhat similarly the owner's manual is not as clear as it could be. The info is all there but it take more than a couple of readings to workout what you need.
Set up appears to require the GUI. I would rather it could all be done with the front panel.
However, once you have worked out the above problems, actual viewing ang listening is superb.
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