284
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #93,328 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★★
Great Receiver - Fixed!
This receiver does everything it's supposed to, sets up beautifully, sounds great, is perfect, etc, except for one thing that (in certain specific cases) will really let you down. Denon receivers (not just this one) seem to have a problem decoding Dolby Digital Plus. What is Dolby Digital Plus (or DD+) you ask? Well it just happens to be the audio compression used by Netflix for 5.1 surround sound. If you plan on watching your Netflix videos through any devices that have HDMI passthrough (Playstation 3, WD TV, Chromecast, etc) then you will find your movies and shows sounding pretty crappy.. hissing, audio dropoff, artifacts, garbled dialog, etc.
I've been in contact with Denon, who say they are working on recreating the problem, but even if they do identify it, then you're gonna be waiting for a new firmware to be written, proofed, developed, tested, and rolled out... that's up do you, but I think it might be too much for me.
UPDATE 3/3/2014: Denon has rolled out a big firmware update (about 25 minutes to install) which has completely fixed this issue. I will leave the old review up so people can understand what WAS happening, but it is completely fixed. The receiver is now an awesome entry-level surround HDMI receiver which I would recommend to anyone - not to mention that Denon customer support took a customer issue seriously, followed up, stayed in contact and fixed the issue. 10/10 would complain again.
October 2013 · Electronics