Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Denon owners. How much do you like your receivers?

Another vote for "Denon receivers have decent power and lots of features but are horrible to set up". HK receivers have tons of power (despite being rated for maybe 1/2 as much as a comparable Denon), a very simple UI, and almost no features other than the ability to set different crossover frequencies for each set of speakers, which is really cool.

Bayne,

The best advice I can give you is buy a few different brands and do some critical listening. This is what I will do next time I'm shopping around...just like I did when I bought my monitor. I could be wrong but I am starting to believe that surround processing is very much receiver-dependent and the only way you can tell is by listening.

To tell you the truth I really didn't care for mine. It seemed like I was always checking and double checking the speaker levels, tweaking with this or that setting. I always felt like I had to find something else. I gave it to my son, who seems to really like it and purchased an HK , which I do prefer. I spent more time reading/rereading the manual than I ever did listening to it.

Why don't you "tweak" your HK. Is it because you feel that you found the perfect configuration and now you're sticking with it?

I've found the perfect configuration for stereo but I always have to tweak my settings for surround. It's not the Denon but rather my source material and to some extent my room that necessitates this. Last night for example I was watching A History of Violence and I had the centre set to 0 and it sounded fantastic. The other night I was watching Unforgiven and I had a heck of a time with the centre. I had to tweak the volume, cross-over and tone controls.

And in PLIIx or Neo6, when I listen to music, I sometimes turn the centre off as I feel that gives me a better soundstage.

Regarding the "horrible to setup" comments. I love my Denon but I have to agree.

However, I'm one of those geeks who is actually slightly disappointed if my electronics is too easy to set up. I know it's completely wrong but I can't shake that subconscious feeling that if it's too simple to configure than it can't be as high end as I need. Remnants of my first gen. programming days.

Denon may even actually design their product around misdirected souls like mine.
Maybe hypnosis would help.

Guys, thanks for all the comments and advice thus far. It seems apparent that Denon receivers are a decent product, but quite complex. The weak remote issue has never bothered me as that can be corrected by a decent universal one--and trust me, no remote is as poor as the one for my Yamaha RX-V595a. I haven't yet been completely won over by any brand as of yet, I'll wait for the reviews to start coming out before that happens. However the Denon is in the lead. It will definitely be interesting to see how well Denon's Audyssey MultEQ XT audio set-up works with this new generation of receiver, as well as the new GUI which reportedly is modelled after Yamaha's current one.

I am totally seduced by the notion of that Audyssey Multi EQ XT.

And I don't think it's so much that the Denon stuff is "complex"; my opinion is that they have made controlling and modifying the complexity inherent in this sort of product frustratingly non-intuitive. At least for me.

Hello. New to the forum. Looking for speakers to go with the new Denon AVR4306, purchased last Friday. Bailed on the 4308 (replacement, available next month) when I discovered the price was going up another $1,000.

Very happy with it so far. Have run CD and DVD through it, using fiber audio. TV (Pioneer PDP5070) is connected to it with HDMI video and fiber audio. All sound great.

Set up the Internet radio tonight, took maybe 15 minutes. Neat feature.

The unit has a web page that can be accessed from any PC in your house. It greatly improves your view into the unit.

Denon gets a bad rap for confusing manuals, and their on-screen display is horrible. The web-based configuration improves that. I haven't had an issue with the manual, but in the interest of full disclosure, I'm an electrical engineer - I'm supposed to think like they do. AVS Forum has a very helpful group of Denon enthusiasts on a number of unit pages.

Hope that helps. Like your speakers? That's the reason I'm here.

Goldy, another welcome. Yep, we like 'em; outstanding performance/price ratio. I deduce that a setup including M60s would be what you're looking for, so buy, listen, enjoy(or listen before, if you get that audition).

Sounds like you pretty much have the same system that I have. Bang for the buck I think that the Axioms are hard to beat. The only other speakers that have peaked my interest cost about 3-4-5x as much.