Review Date 5/11/2009

I unboxed this monolith of an AV processor and took a moment to admire its luxurious classy looks before lifting it into its new home, pride of place at the top of my Hi-Fi rack.

Despite the intimidating amount of inputs and outputs on the back, connection was fairly simple (im not easily scared intimidated). I connected it from its standard RCA Pre outputs into my Myryad power amplifiers, 2 X MA240 (Each bridged mono Front L/R) 1 X MA360 (C/RL/RR). Unfortunately i do not have a sub connected yet but im due to be sent one for review shortly.  Also im using a PS3 as my Blu Ray source at the moment and this will also be upgraded very soon to DVD-A1UD (or similar, Maybe an Oppo). My speakers are Naim Arrivas front/rear and Naim Ncent Center. Display is Pioneer KRP-600 Plasma 60in.

First time power up I spent a second checking my speakers were all connected to the correct inputs etc by doing a quick channel sweep in the speaker setup. Ohhhh a microphone :-) lets get that plugged in and get started setting this baby up. Without reading the manual I managed to work out how to calibrate the system using 8 different mic locations throughout my room starting with my main seating position (Took about 15 Mins) . Unfortunately the resulting parameters weren't exactly accurate, and me being fussy decided to do some manual tweaking with my trusty old sound pressure meter, i set up all levels to 75db and adjusted the speaker distances to the more accurate distances. My rear speakers needed to also be changed from small to large.

Audyssey, ok ive not been playing for long but ive decided that dynamic volume and dynamic EQ are not for the purist. So far im liking the Audyssey standard setting, i will give more details of the sound quality once i have had more time with the unit.

The menus can be very confusing and sometimes its not easy to find exactly what your looking for. I do still believe work can be done here on Denon’s part and the remote controls are awful. That aside, its worth spending the time to fiddle and tweak. Setting up the video switching and audio switching was very easy though. One thing that took me 3 hours to find in the menus was the internet radio, i do feel this could be implemented much better and it does feel like its a cheap software addition. Many of the buttons it refers to dont exist on the remote and that gets quite annoying. Browsing through stations is also painfully slow as is UPnP sharing of music from my media PC, its also not very intuitive and feels like a feature added because they could.

Still trying to work out the best settings for Blu ray, Sky HD etc on the Video scaler because to be honest, i know very little about video scaling, im currently experimenting and will be adding some of my preferred settings in the coming months so watch this space.

So does it sound good? So far, i haven't had much time to optimise the settings, first impressions,  Its phenomenal!!! I had a Tagmclaren AV32R 7.1 and that was great, this is Phenomenal. Both music (with Tone Defeated in 2 CH) and Movies (Audyssey flat) are awesome, im hearing so many things ive never heard before and the sound never seems to get harsh or hard as the volume goes up. Granted its been a very short time so far but menus and silly remote aside im blown away. Im not getting the results from my DVD’s into the video scaler id hoped for but thats almost certainly me.  First impressions are extremely positive.  Im looking forward to writing a full in depth review very soon when i feel confident i can give this behemoth the time it deserves.