Denon AVC-A1H, special request for Gene to review and bench test this new beast!

[dlaloum]

Human Eye FPS: How Much Can We See and Process Visually? (healthline.com)

 

[fteixeira]

How does it handle bass management thru the analog inputs.... especially the balanced inputs?

 

[AVR Enthu]

Many of the anecdotal comments from gamers talk about improved responsiveness at higher frame rates - that is to say, the integration between the input mechanisms mouse/keyboard/game controllers and the feedback from the screen.... many of these primarily relate to GPU processing lag, and not to visual acuity.

I am not talking about responsiveness of mechanical parts.
There's plenty of studies showing a meaningful perception of movement ~150 fps.
I can send links or you might wish to look around.
There is more to this topic than a single study mentioned.
Human Eye FPS: How Much Can We See and Process Visually? (healthline.com)

 

[AVR Enthu]

So now that we have 4k/120Hz... where and why the big push for more?

As I said, required bandwidth is a combination of bit depth, resolution, refresh rate and colour scheme. More advanced displays have been coming into market, exploiting one, two or all of those features contributing to bandwidth. It does not need to be higher refresh rate only. 5120x2160 90Hz 10-bit monitor already saturates a full 48 Gbps port. The push comes from partially from PC world and diverse new monitors, plus increasing number of 4K/144Hz TVs that will be released into the market.

 

[dlaloum]

I am not talking about responsiveness of mechanical parts.
There's plenty of studies showing a meaningful perception of movement ~150 fps.
I can send links or you might wish to look around.
There is more to this topic than a single study mentioned.
Human Eye FPS: How Much Can We See and Process Visually? (healthline.com)

Great - Do you have any evidence to support that?
I have read studies that talked about 60fps being the limit for most people, and a few that extended that as far as 75fps.... but nothing more.

 

[AVR Enthu]

There are much greater benefits to be gained in improving contrast, colour gamut, full array dimming

I agree with this, mostly for LCD displays. For OLED, contrast is brilliant by default and local dimming is not needed as there's per pixel dimming.

At the same time, displays improve refresh rate, or offer true 10-bit image or increase resolutions gradually, or all of those together. This requires more bandwidth. There's no doubt about it when you look into trends, what's been announced and what is happening in the market.

 

[AVR Enthu]

Human vision processing is relatively slow ... our auditory processing is much much faster.... we live perpetually in a made up virtual reality world, as the feed from our eyes, is delayed, so we "imagine" what is going on and use subsequent feedback to correct after the fact.... all of which we do subconsciously.

Let's not be dragged into this "neural" rabbit hole and lose focus. Vision is negligibly slower, for 10-20 ms, as neural pathway to visual cortex is longer than the one to auditory cortex. However, the speed of light overcompensates for the slow speed of sound. We are more sensitive to visual input, have larger brain area for visuo-spatial processing and can react much faster to visual stimuli hitting our retina with a speed of light, long before hearing the source. Evolution has clearly favoured vision as a dominant sense with highest adaptive and survival value. Being quick in detecting changes in motion meant life and death to our ancestors. So, there's that too, an evolutionary basis for perceiving high refresh rate motion.

Let's not go there again in this discussion. It's not necessary, really. It has nothing to do with AVRs evolving their ports to 48 Gbps. Completely silly to call upon this aspect of neuroscience to justify AVRs staying on 40 Gbps ports.

There are more developments in tech world nowadays that are putting in serious doubt AVRs enjoying the glory of 40 Gbps ports for foreseeable future. Innovation doesn't stop with the latest stable edition of transceiver and repeater chips. I have mentioned those real innovations happening right now in the posr above, while you are requesting evidence from studies of perception.

Is there a global conspiracy in monitor industry to sell millions of monitors with high refresh rate to gamers and lie to them that the benefit is real?

You can try it for yourself by scrolling through a simple .pdf file with 60Hz and 144Hz. If you can't see the difference, there is a problem with your vision, not the monitor signal.

 

[PENG]

It is a shame, I agree. I'd like to hear proper and accurate reasons why, from more engineers. I don't want to hear about 12-bit and 8K. Those are not relevant reasons as to why not have 48 Gbps ports on AVRs.

Most high-end AVRs do support 40 Gbps on all ports. Some have three of those and three 24 Gbps, which is fine because having all high-speed ports is most often than not a total overkill. But having one or two 48 Gbps is not an overkill.

In theory, and to satisfy my curiosity, I would like to hear the reasons too, from the engineers you referred to. On the practical side, I really don't believe it would make any visible difference. On the audio side, we all know in a blind comparison test, all else being equal, there is no audible difference between an AVP that uses something like an ES9038Pro dac chip and one that uses an ES9026Pro that has much lower specs. There is a reason why the most expensive AVP by Trinnov wouldn't use better DAC chips than those they are using, and that's just one of many examples where many manufacturers took advantage (rightly so in most cases) of leveraging the point of diminishing return.

Also, on the audio side, there is no alternative in the case where the specifications in questions are hardware limited whereas on the video side, there are often the option of connecting the HDMI out of the source device directly to the display and a second HDMI out to the AVR/AVP for audio. That's just for those who think they can actually see the difference the highest refresh rate you are talking about.

 

[PENG]

We can actually compare the SINAD and SNR of the A1H to the AV10:

 

[PENG]

Forgot to include the links, not sure if I posted them before:

Denon's new flagship AVR, the AVC-A1H technical introduction - YouTube

New flagship Marantz AV Separates AV 10 and AMP 10 introduction - YouTube

 

[AVR Enthu]

on the video side, there are often the option of connecting the HDMI out of the source device directly to the display and a second HDMI out to the AVR/AVP for audio

This option is not available on monitors.
I will give you one simple example where additional 8 Gbps makes a real difference In everyday life.

You might have heard about new Samsung OLED monitor announced at CES. It's Odyssey Neo G9, 57-inch ultra-wide flagship 7680x2160p 10-bit 240Hz monitor. To see fully speced image on it, it needs to be fed with roughly 137 Gbps of video data. No single port can provide that much nowadays without using DSC codec.

Now, using the highest compression ratio 3.75:1 for DSC, the full spec image for this new monitor can fit into 48 Gbps port, but it cannot fit into 40 Gbps DSC pass-through pipeline. So, you need a full speed HDMI port to run this monitor with out of the box image.

If you connect this monitor to current AVRs, image quality will have to be compromised from RGB/444 to 422 chroma, and its non-standard resolution and refresh rate might not work at all. This needs to be fixed in future AVRs:
1. Full speed HDMI ports
2. More custom resolutions and refresh rates supported, beyond standard TV parameters.

It's a business case to be made for AVRs to become more appealing devices in new markets. Let's be honest here. Almost every single AVR and AV processor with HDMI FRL ports in last two years has been aggressively marketed towards console and PC gamers who happen to use 4K TV for gaming.

This strategy can bring you just as many new and easy customers. If AVR companies really want to penetrate PC gaming world further, those AVRs will need to become more friendly in connectivity with monitors, which are more diverse than TVs and require longer listings in EDID. And, growing number of those monitors require full speed ports for fully speced image to work, compressed or uncompressed.

At the end of the day, there shouldn't be any stubbornness in AVR circles not to provide full speed ports, when Nvidia, AMD, Intel, LG, Samsung, TCL, Sony and other TV and monitor makers routinely provide 48 Gbps ports on source and sink devices. Would you agree?

 

[Trebdp83]

Hard sell in an Audioholic forum thread. If you care about 48Gbps uncompressed video performance for gaming as well as audio performance for movies and music, you will have to settle for a direct connection to a TV/monitor as new high priced AVRs simply aren’t equipped for the job. Eh, it is what it is. Forget the HDMI bandwidth. I’d never drop 6K for an AVR that couldn't apply DTS Neural:X to DTS 96kHz signals. That's some bulls#%t.

 

[snakeeyes]

Guessing most people would run this as 9.1.6 instead of 7.1.8 ?

8 overhead speakers? It would be interesting to have a review of that.

 

[AVR Enthu]

Great - Do you have any evidence to support that? I have read studies that talked about 60fps being the limit for most people, and a few that extended that as far as 75fps.... but nothing more.

It's a complex field of research. The most humble approach is that there are no simple answers, such as that we can see differences between 90 or 150 or 400 fps. It does not work like that. There are plenty of studies and ways to measure what human eye can see under certain conditions. Some tests measure merely ability to process flickering of light, which is not what gamers do. They process moving images and track objects, which involves more visuo-spatial systems.

Perception of fast moving objects will depend on type of display, type of content, quality of image and factors within our visual system. You can do a quick self-test with a classic UFO moving image. The higher fps, the more smooth moving object appears to be, with less choppiness and less blur. This website also gives you persistence test, ghosting tests, panning and black frame insertion. All interesting on their own. If you have a high refresh rate good monitor, you can even determine confortable fps value and upper value of visible fps for your own eyes. When I scroll through large .pdf file, on ~100Hz setting it feels comfortable enough to still see some parts of text. 60Hz setting is too blurry. 144Hz scrolling looks even better.

Blur Busters TestUFO Motion Tests

Blur Busters UFO Motion Tests with ghosting test, 30fps vs 60fps, 120hz vs 144hz vs 240hz, PWM test, motion blur test, judder test, benchmarks, and more.

www.testufo.com

Display type (TN/LCD/OLED) can affect how you experience clarity and smoothness of fast moving content, with ghosting and blooming effects that can significantly reduce out ability to perceive smooth and well-defined, but fast moving objects. Devil is always in details. Finally, you can train your eyes to enjoy higher refresh rate display. Here is some reading.

How many frames per second can the human eye really see?

30 fps? 60 fps? If you've ever debated framerates, the cognitive researchers we spoke to have some complex answers for you.

www.pcgamer.com

AMO.NET America's Multimedia Online (Human Eye Frames Per Second)

AMO.NET America's Multimedia Online (Human Eye Frames Per Second 2)

Hope this answers some of your questions. It's a fascinating topic, but for different thread with more details. Apologies to all for taking space here.

 

[ryanosaur]

Guessing most people would run this as 9.1.6 instead of 7.1.8 ?

8 overhead speakers? It would be interesting to have a review of that.

I know .4 is pretty standard, and I keep getting mixed reports of running .6... Some say it's great, other say it's a waste because sometimes there's no content. *shrugs
I likely wouldn't try to put .8 in anything but a larger dedicated HT. And even then, depending on the processor, I would probably give discrete Subwoofer channels the priority for the AVRs and AVPs that have those limited .

 

[snakeeyes]

I know .4 is pretty standard, and I keep getting mixed reports of running .6... Some say it's great, other say it's a waste because sometimes there's no content. *shrugs
I likely wouldn't try to put .8 in anything but a larger dedicated HT. And even then, depending on the processor, I would probably give discrete Subwoofer channels the priority for the AVRs and AVPs that have those limited .

Think people were saying some streaming titles were mixed 7.1.2, so on 6 overheads all the sound ended up on the middle 2 overheads. Not sure if this is true or not.

 

[snakeeyes]

Hard sell in an Audioholic forum thread. If you care about 48Gbps uncompressed video performance for gaming as well as audio performance for movies and music, you will have to settle for a direct connection to a TV/monitor as new high priced AVRs simply aren’t equipped for the job. Eh, it is what it is. Forget the HDMI bandwidth. I’d never drop 6K for an AVR that couldn't apply DTS Neural:X to DTS 96kHz signals. That's some bulls#%t.

So only content I can remember being DTS 96/24 is Queen Greatest Video Hits. Why would this be a challenge to upmix?

 

[AVR Enthu]

Hard sell in an Audioholic forum thread. If you care about 48Gbps uncompressed video performance for gaming as well as audio performance for movies and music, you will have to settle for a direct connection to a TV/monitor as new high priced AVRs simply aren’t equipped for the job. Eh, it is what it is. Forget the HDMI bandwidth. I’d never drop 6K for an AVR that couldn't apply DTS Neural:X to DTS 96kHz signals. That's some bulls#%t.

I am ok with hard sell. 40 Gbps ports were also born in pain... 48 Gbps ports are clear on a wish-list of one part of AVR enthusiasts, who happen top be gaming enthusiasts too. They are willing to spend thousands and they are voicing their need for further innovation on HDMI boards which are currently, by no means, a finished work.

 

[ryanosaur]

Think people were saying some streaming titles were mixed 7.1.2, so on 6 overheads all the sound ended up on the middle 2 overheads. Not sure if this is true or not.

This jibes with what some have said to me.

I’d expect a good upmixer to actually parse the sound appropriately as Top Middle is usually the last option employed… Most recommendTop Front and Top Back. Front and Rear Heights usually come in as a secondary suggestion for those not willing or unable to do Tops.

 

[Trebdp83]

So only content I can remember being DTS 96/24 is Queen Greatest Video Hits. Why would this be a challenge to upmix?

Most of the limitations in new audio/video devices are not hardware related but licensing deal related. AVRs at the middle and bottom of the line can be expected to drop certain features. But, if AVR manufacturers want top dollar for top of the line models, they need to spend a little coin as well so those who spent big bucks on their last gen top of the line model aren't losing anything with the next gen top of the line model. Beside licensing deals, HDCP rules over HDMI and has crippled legacy analog device accommodation in new 4K AVRs and basically done away with them in new TVs.

I think any top of the line model from any brand should be offering at least one 48Gbps HDMI port. Two other ports can be 40Gbps and the remaining can be 18Gbps ports. No stand alone streamer or disc player currently needs more than 18Gbps. This port setup would work for those with a state of the art gaming PC on the 48Gbps port and a PS5 and XBOX Series X/S on the 40Gbps ports. A universal disc player from Oppo or Sony, a streamer from Amazon, Apple Google, Nvidia or Roku and a cable box from any one of multiple brands can fill up the 18Gbps ports. They'll all look great on a new 10 bit panel OLED TV. Oh, wait...