Not necessarily. I paid
£699/$862 for an
IOTAVX 7.1 4K AVP (pic below). It is light on features - which I wanted, but it has all the basics - including center channel sound, basic room correction DSP, and XLR output. It works perfectly for me, which is good, because it cost a lot to ship it here to the mountains of Western Panama from the UK via Miami, USA, and would not be easy to get service or resell it. It wasn't festooned with "HiRes Audio" and other stickers when I got it, which is also good, because I like the "as simple as possible, but no simpler" approach. I get up-mixed center channel sound that I can defeat when it affects really good stereo recordings by simply turning off my center channel amplifier with its front switch. I always seem to be a bit off the mainstream audio consumer track, but yet again in a long lifetime in the audio hobby, managed to assemble a system that suits me perfectly considering my room, budget and fairly wide-ranging taste in music. I think this is as close to a competent design with a minimalist approach that one can find in the AVP arena.
The Denon looks good, but would be waaaay overkill for me. However, based on this ASR review and thread, I would not hesitate to recommend it highly for non-audiophile/videophile friends looking for a modern, good-performing "all-in-one" AVR and could afford it.
Unfortunately, for many retired expats like me living in a small rental house or apartment on an even more limited pension then mine, anything more than a Smart TV with an Amazon Firestick is out of reach. Most of my friends and acquaintances don't even have sound bars, much less discrete external speakers and subwoofers for their TV's. However, a couple of well-heeled expat retirees whom I know actually have full-on dedicated home theater rooms with videophile multichannel sound.
At this time in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic, it is a miracle that we have high-speed internet and high-res streaming video from around the world even in remote corners of developing nations like Panama. Video via the internet is our "window to the world". Life here in Boquete during the restrictions of a pandemic would be quite different without it.
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