AUDIO-VISUAL
W
e keep finding ourselves attending
press events in which the mega
electronics makers reveal their
latest products. Normally they
are showing off their latest TVs and soundbars.
These days the TVs are pretty uniformly first-class,
but we feel distinctly uncomfortable as they tout
the virtues of their soundbars. To be fair, many
of these soundbars don’t sound too horrible
these days, but neither do they produce effective
surround sound, real high fidelity stereo or deep,
extended bass.
If you want those things (and since you’re
reading Best Buys Audio & AV we think there’s a
good chance that you do), the starting point is a
home theatre receiver. Which brings us to Denon.
For more than 20 years we’ve been impressed
with Denon’s AV receivers. We’ve been using
them and writing about them right back to
the early days of the DVD. And as they have
improved relentlessly over that time, their prices
have actually fallen. Consider, back in 1999 the
105W-per-channel Denon AVR-3300 cost $2395.
Now, two decades later, the kind of equivalent
105W-per-channel AVR-X3500H costs $2099.
And that’s counting in today’s inflated
dollar. That old AVR-3300 cost very nearly
$4000 in 2019 money. Plus, you get much
more of a receiver now than you did then. The
AVR-X3500H (pictured top right) has seven
amplifier channels rather than five. It supports
all the Dolby and DTS formats that have been
released since then, including Dolby Atmos and
DTS:X. The AVR-X3500H has eight HDMI
inputs. The old one had none! Both have a phono
input, although there was a period there in which
few receivers sported that feature.
It even calibrates itself automatically. We nearly
forgot about that, but back in those days installing
an AV receiver meant having a tape measure and
SPL meter to hand.
And the AVR-X3500H is only in
the middle of Denon’s range of six
networked AV receivers. Let’s start
by looking at some of the common-
alities between them all.NETWORKING & HEOS
You can identify these receivers easily
enough by the ‘H’ suffix on the
model numbers. ‘H’ is, in this case,
for ‘HEOS’. That’s the multiroom
audio system that started as a
standalone arrangement (see p14),
but now includes quite a few Denon
products. All six of these AVRs canbe treated as HEOS speakers, or as part of a group
of them. And HEOS has a special feature not
available in most multiroom systems. You can feed
content from any source plugged into a HEOS
device to any other speaker or group of speakers.
If you have a turntable plugged into a Denon
AVR-X3500H receiver — any of them, actually
— you can also have its sound emerging from the
HEOS speaker in your bedroom.
That requires network connectivity, of course.
All of them have both Ethernet and Wi-Fi. They
all support streaming services such as Spotify
Connect, Tidal and Deezer, as well as TuneIn
internet radio stations, all of which can be accessed
using the HEOS app (below).
You can even open up the built-in web page
of each of these receivers on a browser on any
computer or device connected to the same
network, and make adjustments from there.
And when it comes
to streaming local music
content, all six of them
are fully equipped. High
resolution audio —
FLAC, WAV and Apple
Lossless up to 192kHz
sampling, regular and
double-speed DSD —
is handled, as are lossy
formats like MP3, WMA
and AAC. Apple homes
can use AirPlay 2, which
also supports multiroom
operation. AirPlay 2 is
wireless, of course. But allAV RECEIVER RANGE
DENON home theatre receivers
Rather than a single review, here’s an overview of the entire range
of home cinema receivers and amplifiers from Denon, seeing how
the channel count, power and facilities vary with price level.