I’ve played with this receiver, but had a chance to do a full setup with it this weekend. It was bought at Best Buy for $349 (Better deals exist on the web). I must say, I really like the Denon offerings this year. They’ve made every effort to bring costs down without ruining the product.
Build Quality
The build quality of the Denon is good, but nothing extravagant and bland. Looking inside, it seems less packed than some other receivers like the Harman/Kardon 254. One thing I did not see was a fan which does exist in some other receivers. I see this as a plus since a fan will likely breakdown before anything else. The back of the receiver has full binding posts and isn’t terribly cluttered. I did notice when I pushed the banana plugs into the binding posts, the back plate would bend a bit unlike some other receivers. I should note that this receiver supports 5.1 and not 7.1.
Connectivity
The 590 has 3 HDMI in, 1 HDMI out and some component and composite connections. It has no S-Video except for one for I-Pod purposes only. It also has coax and optical connections for audio. It has preouts for subwoofer, left, and right. The subwoofer is clear to me, but I wasn’t sure why preouts for left and right channels were included. I suppose if you’d like to attach an external amplifier for 2-channel listening, you can do it.
Setup and Remote
This is without a doubt Denon’s Achilles heel in the budget receiver market. I really don’t care about the remote as anyone using a receiver like this will likely have a universal remote. The OSD is white text over a black background if your source uses HDMI and white text over overlay video if your source uses composite. Setup proves a bit more difficult than say the HK 254. Once you get used to it, it’s fine, but for a newbie, setup will take time. One nice thing about the old-fashion, monochrome menus is that they’re snappier than the colorful GUI ones I’ve encountered. It’s kind of nice to zip around the menus quickly and not have to wait for something to animate.
Sound and Power
The receiver out of the box with manual setup sounds pretty much no different to me than the comparable receivers at moderate volume. Then I ran Audyssey… Despite being a budget receiver, Denon included the MultiEQ as opposed to the 2EQ used in the Onkyo 607 which is a more expensive receiver. I have never been a fan of Audyssey, but I don’t believe I have ever used the MultiEQ. I can say it does matter and made a huge difference in the room the 590 was installed in. Without Audyssey engaged, the sound was shrill and thin by comparison. Audyssey nailed everything except the subwoofer level and distance; a quick, manual adjustment. Power-wise, the 590 didn’t disappoint. I pushed it pretty hard and it handled everything without issue. It was barely warm after heavy use probably due to lack of video processing. The 590 does include decoders for all the HD audio formats.
Video
The 590 will upconvert analog inputs and pipe them out over HDMI, but does not upscale. I actually like the fact that Denon went this route. In my opinion, scalers in budget receivers suck in general. Most of the time, the scaler in the display will do a better job and a scaler inside a receiver adds heat. All budget receivers should use this implementation in my opinion. The 590 does de-interlace 480i to 480p; pretty harmless. If you want a scaler, stepping up to the 1910/790 will get you an Anchor Bay chip.
It appears Denon has nailed the budget receiver market. The lack of full preouts isn’t a big deal as you probably wouldn’t use an external amp in this price range. The Audyssey features are fabulous including the Dynamic Volume which does work on all sources to my surprise. Handy feature… Denon still includes a robust enough amp section which is nice considering so many started skimping. If Denon starts adding an easy-to-use GUI and preouts to all their receivers, they’ll be unstoppable.
