I am slowly getting in the gear thats going into my parents dedicated theater room in our new house, Yesterday we recieved the reciever. B&K avr507.
First I will say that I work at a custom home theater/automation etc company so I have acess to almost any brand I want. Although we use Denon almost exclusively for our installs I really wasnt all that impressed with their units. Mainly because im a 2 channel guy so my first priority is sound quality. Considering that we put in the Axiom Epic 80 7.1 system with the EP600 I knew that I wanted something with some balls.
My boss who does admittedly have alot more personal experience with the brands we carry reccomended the Denon's over the B&K because he likes the features and he also commented about the video switching being better. Well as far as features go Im a simple guy so i really dont want 60 different settings that i will never use, each with their own repective logo's on the front panel like its a billboard. Well I think he was right about the video switching. I pretty much just blew it off because i figure that with a reciever that lists at $3500 bucks you better dang well be getting quality. So far the sound is great. At first I couldnt even figure out how to get the dang thing working because like I said, Im a 2 channel guy so it was sort of confusing at first. I havent adjusted any of the settings yet. That will come later when everything is properly setup.
But the component video is what im dissapointed in. With our cheap dvd player connected to the projector directly the picture is good, But connected through the reciever i can see some scrolling lines very faintly when the screen is black. Like how you would see if looking at a CRT through a video camera. I also noticed that when i put in finding nemo that through the reciever some areas looked like you could see the lines in the picture vs directly connected you coudlnt really see them at all.
The reciever isint going back, I got it for its quality and reliabilty and sound output which i believe is probbably right up there with the best as far as recievers go. The main reason we installed this theater room was for resale value on the house so in a couple years we're going to be leaving it all behind and im quite sure that whoever buys it wont be a theater buff since not many are. Nobody else will notice the degrigation of quality through the video so im not stressing about it. Perhaps I just need to adjust some settings (highly doubt it) but that was a dissapointment for me.
The rest of the equipment going in is a Denon DVD 2910, Screen Research 110" retractible Clearpix 2 fabric and our PJ is the Infocus 7205 which will be connected via some bettercables silver serpent component that in the wall already.
Getting back to the reciever itself, Its made very well. I REALLY like the binding posts on it. Which was one of the major selling points for me because 90% of recievers are so cramped and have cheap posts. Also the universal remote that comes with it is quite nice, although ive yet to program it.
Overall impression? Very positive. The Main reason i bought this reciever was again, sound and power output. If the video switching didnt have this flaw i would say its about as perfect as I could ask for. Of course it doesnt have any HDMI or DVI or tons and tons of features but I dont need those so why pay for them.
