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- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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7 out of 7 people found this review helpful
3.0 stars
"Very hard to use"
Pros: Great picture, and sound. Lots of inputs.
Cons: Awful remote. Awful user manual. Awful interface all around. Don't buy unless you love troubleshooting.
Summary: Every positive thing people say about this unit's sound and video quality is correct.
However this is the most difficult receiver to use ever built. I'm a network engineer who loves reading operating manuals and home theater is my passion. Forget about the casual user (wife, baby sitter, etc) getting the hang of this thing. How to change an option when I'm looking right at it is a challenge. They use different terms between the remote, the manual, the on screen display and the unit LCD. Is "RCA" the same as "composite"? Sometimes. The whole interface is inconsistant. It's like each section was programmed by different engineers in different countries.
Want more examples?
The remote: To control the reciever (the most common use) you have to click some hard button on the remote to get the soft buttons to light up. Already I'm annoyed. Then you have to click the "amp" soft button. But you better not click it twice because then you are in a different mode and then you have to click it three more times to cycle back to the regular amp control mode. And one of those modes you cycle through is 'system call' programming mode. How do you know you are in a different mode? Only by subtle differences in what buttons are enabled. Try telling your wife, "you've clicked the amp button too many times and accidently entered 'system call' mode and erased all of the programmed frequencies and macros". This is a very real possibility with this remote.
I could go on and on with the speaker binding posts being way to close together (too close for even my banana plugs), to the labeling of the inputs on the back, to the way you change the soundfield to the user manual that is full of conditions like "if this then this, except this and that, then only if the other thing." This equipment is user hostile.
- 1 reply to this review
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Rodger nailed it! I am also an engineer and am seen by family and friends as a "first call" resource for anything and everything "tach". With that said, the engineering behind this unit defies explanation. To sum it up, when I have a babysitter arranged for an evening, I ask them to come over about 20 minutes early just to explain how to use this monster. The remote is counter-intuitive, the buttons on the front panel barely correlate to either audio or visual functions, and worse of all, if you hit a wrong sequence either on the remote or the panel, you can get yourself into no man's land. I have had do a hard reset on this thing more than a dozen times since owning it. Lastly, I have never been able to get any HDMI pass-through to work, so it has only been an audio reviever from day one. Denon support is worthless and the folks I spoke with knew less than I did about the unit. Horrible!!!!
