• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Denon AVR-X1700H Measurements

peniku8

Senior Member
Joined
Dec 9, 2020
Messages
421
Likes
920
With the recent price drops of Denon AVRs in Germany (349€ for this particular model) I decided to upgrade my current stereo setup to a surround system.
This is the EU model, which, unlike the US version, does not have pre-outs for front left and front right. I have active mains however, so I will be modding the AVR with impedance balanced, 18dBu capable XLR outputs. More on that later.

7znWq9W.jpeg


In all tests I fed the AVR via HDMI and used the pure-direct mode. A notable observation was that it starts clipping beyond -1.5MV.

Amplifier Tests:

8 Ohm power: 140W
Dynamic Range: ~107dB


vZuHjnP.jpeg



2ch 8 Ohm power: 110W

0VBOWFE.jpeg



4 Ohm Power: 205W


8gskYfM.jpeg



2ch 4 Ohm Power: 150W

0xsiSdr.jpeg



2 Ohm Power: 245W


W47pMuZ.jpeg


I did not test more channels at 2 ohm since the manual only specifies 8 and 6 ohm and I was afraid to damage something.

I have a seperate 'power over time' test outside of REW:
Burst headroom 1ch driven:

t5rKv2S.png



Burst duration: ~20ms, dropping in level from the very beginning.

odSMSVE.png


Sustained power is the power at the end of the test duration (3s). Burst power shown here is the power at the beginning of the test (which is not super useful, since it's so short). Highlighted region (white) is 20ms (after which it's already 1dB down). Power is calculated RMS from the peak voltage value, which means eventual distortion is not taken into account. Sustained power figures here are similar to the measurements in REW (a little lower since this does not allow any distortion with my method to derive power from the peak values).

Typically I also include power over time graphs but it's not very interesting for this amp so I'll skip that.

Some amplifiers reverse the polarity of the second (or every other) channel internally (and than reverse it back to normal again at the output) for better stability in the power supply, so I wanted to test if I could measure a difference in the first channel if I reversed the polarity of channel 2.
For reference, here is the normal 8 Ohm test with 2 channels driven again:

0VBOWFE.jpeg



Now with the 2nd channel inverted:

GimsfhQ.jpeg



Interesting! The distortion hump around 15W disappears entirely. It seems like Denon doesn't use this trick in their AVRs, unlike many pro audio manufacturers do. To me, it would make sense to do so on the 2nd channel of every channel pair, altho it doesn't matter in terms of fidelity. With regular music content, this kind of distortion will not be audible. Still, if additional performance could be had by swapping two cable pairs then why not?


Frequency response: -3dB from 1Hz-60KHz

ACbBbWX.jpeg



Load dependency (none) and output impedance (0,17 Ohm):

4lSeolU.jpeg



THD vs Frequency:

A5FHpJP.jpeg



THD vs level XLR out (@18dBu max; Zout 200Ohm):

MTjsDMK.jpeg



Spectrum @-88dB THD+N:

bYvJb3b.jpeg



Dynamic Range: 109dB

eoXXzZf.jpeg



IMD: no anomalies

mAH102R.jpeg



Schematic to convert amp outputs into impedance balanced XLRs and convert the amp's maximum output voltage of ~43V to 18dBu (~6V):

AP1BqBd.png



I haven't used the amp yet as my decision to get a 5.1 setup was a little spontaneous, so I have to build a center and two surrounds first before I will listen to it. Sadly only the 3x00 and up models come with Audyssey XT32, but my mains have a flat in-room profile on their amplifiers so I'm not very concerned about this being an issue. They also go down to 16Hz in my room so I will be using them as a subwoofer replacement.


And happy new year everybody :)
 
So would you put this on the recommended list?
 
So would you put this on the recommended list?
It's technically a pretty good little amp, but Audyssey is extremely bad. If I didn't have EQ capabilities directly on my (active) mains, I would've returned it. It was unlistenable.

I'll just copy and paste what I wrote on another forum:

Listening impressions:

-After first Audyssey-only setup:
Honestly it sounded so bad I just wanted to rip everything out again. My mains were EQ'd to 'perfection' already and Audyssey messed that up big time, for whatever reason. Everything else sounded super weird too and plain stereo through my normal DAC sounded way better than anything that came out of the Denon. I then decided to reset the room EQ on my mains, re-measure the system with Audyssey and then correct whatever it did on the amps later in the chain.

-Second Audyssey setup via phone
This went pretty smoothly and you get much more tweaking options for target and corrections in the Audyssey app. I made the target a 5dB slope (why is it correcting to in-room flat by default???) and lowered the upper limit of the correction for the mains to 600Hz, center to around 1KHz iirc and surrounds full range.
Right off the bat, everything sounded a lot better than before, but as you can see in the pic above, there is still a lot of weirdness going on, mainly:
-Front right 1dB too loud
-8dB 40Hz peak left uncorrected (why???)
-Front right ~6dB too loud around 250Hz
-Speaker distances not entirely conclusive

-Third time's the charm:
I corrected the LR based on my measurements and loaded the EQ presets onto their amplifiers.
Corrected levels for all speakers based on my moving mic measurements.
Corrected speaker distances (relative to each other) based on sweeps.
Corrected everything else in EQapo for PCM content.
After all this in place, I also tried out DSU again for stereo content and it's pretty decent. Bistreamed movies sound great now too and gaming is just a delight through all the additional corrections in Apo.
By no means a perfect system, but a pretty good sounding one now nonetheless! I'm happy overall and for the money I've spent on it (50€ since I had all the drivers already and wood was just scraps I had lying around so the only things I bought were crossover components and speaker terminals) the outcome is obviously great. I'm also happy with the installation visually and the cables are pretty much invisible.
The mains are hooked up via XLR and the noise floor is inaudible, I love that.
And I'm quite happy that I can use my mains for the LFE channel, since they go down to 16Hz in my room.

And measurements post Audyssey (controlled and optimized in the Audyssey app already):

eN5a3ae.jpeg


Overall a nearly 10dB error. I've taken a measurement of my dad's setup, which has a X6700H that uses XT32 and the error was smaller, but still a pretty bad 5dB on that one. Better than nothing I guess? I don't know how DIRAC compares but I wouldn't have high hopes for it. I only trust my own measurements and corrections nowadays :rolleyes:
 
It's technically a pretty good little amp, but Audyssey is extremely bad. If I didn't have EQ capabilities directly on my (active) mains, I would've returned it. It was unlistenable.

Did you know that people raved about the effectiveness of @OCA 's Audyssey One EVO/Nexus or whatever his latest versions are, since you are good with REW, you should be able to get great results. With used, XT32 or just XT, even the lowest MultEQ, should make little difference because REW would be doing the heavy lifting.


I'll just copy and paste what I wrote on another forum:



And measurements post Audyssey (controlled and optimized in the Audyssey app already):

eN5a3ae.jpeg


Overall a nearly 10dB error. I've taken a measurement of my dad's setup, which has a X6700H that uses XT32 and the error was smaller, but still a pretty bad 5dB on that one. Better than nothing I guess? I don't know how DIRAC compares but I wouldn't have high hopes for it. I only trust my own measurements and corrections nowadays :rolleyes:
 
Did you know that people raved about the effectiveness of @OCA 's Audyssey One EVO/Nexus or whatever his latest versions are, since you are good with REW, you should be able to get great results. With used, XT32 or just XT, even the lowest MultEQ, should make little difference because REW would be doing the heavy lifting.

Wow that looks neat, but it looks like it won't work if you have no subwoofer (which is the case for me since my mains go down to 16Hz and that's all I need right now). It's also still automated room correction, which will never be quite perfect. I dropped a message on AVS if it was possible to create a tool to convert manual EQ corrections into an Audyssey file. That would be an absolute game changer. As it stands, I have very little interest in yet another black-box automatic room correction algo.
 
Wow that looks neat, but it looks like it won't work if you have no subwoofer (which is the case for me since my mains go down to 16Hz and that's all I need right now). It's also still automated room correction, which will never be quite perfect. I dropped a message on AVS if it was possible to create a tool to convert manual EQ corrections into an Audyssey file. That would be an absolute game changer. As it stands, I have very little interest in yet another black-box automatic room correction algo.
Maybe Denon with Dirac would have been a better option for your use case.

But, I am still not sure if the Dirac on the Denon's actually time align and is a seperate DAC to each amplifier? I am preusming no, its still just phase aligns so tri-amping would be out of question.
 
My real question is, your saying its a good little amplifier then saying its bad. Just to confirm, are you highlighting that the Audyssey is what is the problem and that the amplifier itself is actually not that bad?
 
My real question is, your saying its a good little amplifier then saying its bad. Just to confirm, are you highlighting that the Audyssey is what is the problem and that the amplifier itself is actually not that bad?
Yea that's what I'm trying to say. Denon did a good job and it's an amazing product for 350€. Audyssey is so far the only thing I don't like about it.

Maybe Denon with Dirac would have been a better option for your use case.

But, I am still not sure if the Dirac on the Denon's actually time align and is a seperate DAC to each amplifier? I am preusming no, its still just phase aligns so tri-amping would be out of question.
Honestly I don't really have much faith in any automated room correction system out there, not even Trinnov, until I've seen before and after MMMs and what kind of filters that applies.
Ideally you'd have fully manual control over every speaker, such as a solution of a CP950A with 2 Unica 8 channel amplifiers plus having anechoic data for every speaker would offer, but that's over 20 grand and of course not comparable to a regular AVR.
Time alignment and phase alignment should be separate. I'm also unsure why AVRs offer to use different crossover frequencies for bass management for each speaker, since this will just introduce phase issues with corelated content, unless they place complimentary all-pass filters on each channel, which would in turn raise group delay a whole bunch... Maybe its the lesser evil when you buy a Walmart 5.1 with matchbox sized surrounds.
 
Maybe Denon with Dirac would have been a better option for your use case.

But, I am still not sure if the Dirac on the Denon's actually time align and is a seperate DAC to each amplifier? I am preusming no, its still just phase aligns so tri-amping would be out of question.

Let’s clear a few things up, Audyssey XT32 subeq HT does time align subs.
Dirac Live Bass control does time align and phase align/optimization as well.

Based on ASR measurements, that “little amp”, namely, Cinema 70, is not very good, but the preamp/ dac is as good or a touch better than the much more expensive Cinema 40.

The OP seems to prefer manual eq, if you prefer auto eq/rc, DLBC is imo the best available on mass produced avrs, followed by Audyssey if you used the paid apps, or the freeware such as OCA’s A1 EVO Neutron.
 
Based on ASR measurements, that “little amp”, namely, Cinema 70, is not very good, but the preamp/ dac is as good or a touch better than the much more expensive Cinema 40.
Does Cinema 70 have the same amp as the above X1700H?
 
Does Cinema 70 have the same amp as the above X1700H?
I have not seen the service manual of the C70S but no it won't have the same amps as the X1700H. The C70S is rated 50 W iirc vs the X1700H's 80 WPC.
Regardless, either may have enough juice for your applications, but they may not. It depends on your listening habits, speakers, distance etc.
I would still not recommended using the C70S without knowing what your actual "power" requirement is, but would definitely recommend it for use as preamp/processor. Again, I used the X1800H (with my buckeye amp) for a few months and had no complaints, the C70S would have been just as good.
 
Based on the other ASR measurements and comparing to my unloaded measurements it's safe to assume that the DAC is restricting performance and not the amp section, as measured DR of the preamp outputs is the same as through the amplifier.
I'm not sure how the Marantz amps found their way into the discussion. Did I miss anything?
 
I'm not sure how the Marantz amps found their way into the discussion. Did I miss anything?
Marantz discussion will be natural in any Denon thread as they are often clones of the cheaper offering:

Cinema 60 = Denon 2800
Cinema 50 = Denon 3800
Cinema 40 = Denon 4800

etc.
 
Based on the other ASR measurements and comparing to my unloaded measurements it's safe to assume that the DAC is restricting performance and not the amp section, as measured DR of the preamp outputs is the same as through the amplifier.
Not sure how you concluded that, clearly for those Denon AVRs, the DAC would not be restricting performance in terms of distortions, based on ASR measurements (the X1700H was not measured by ASR though). The power amp sections were the bottlenecks.
 
Not sure how you concluded that, clearly for those Denon AVRs, the DAC would not be restricting performance in terms of distortions, based on ASR measurements (the X1700H was not measured by ASR though). The power amp sections were the bottlenecks.
Dynamic range of the preouts is the same as the dynamic range on the unloaded amplifier section, which means the DAC is the major contributing factor in terms of noise by likely quite a decent margin. Distortion is below the threshold of audibility in any measurement at any level I've seen (as expected by solid state hardware up to the point of hard clipping) so can be safely ignored.
 
Demystifying Audyssey:
After spending the entire day working on getting the most accurate calibration out of Audyssey XT I've learned a few things:
Audyssey saves the filter/target respose as impulse response and XT's impulse response is way too short to be able to be accurate in bass. It grossly 'smoothes' out the filters it's supposed to apply or in other words: broken by design.

Here is an example:
I took MMMs of my speakers and created 'ideal' filter responses in REW, exported those, reformatted and wrote them into the .ady file that I load into the MultEQ app.
Here is what the filter for my left front speaker looks like (in the Audyssey app; 20Hz-1KHz):
15xJ6WP.jpeg


So far so good, this looks just like what I exported from REW.
Here is the correction that Audyssey XT32 derives from this:

zxMkLtQ.jpeg

Which is exactly the same - nice!

Now XT:
mRE1UHF.jpeg


Yikes. HighQ features are ignored, some weird ripple is added throughout the mids and the EQ below 100Hz is entirely lost.

Overall the shape is tracked somewhat okay-ish:

Ni4B5Kt.jpeg


The mids are just difficult in my room and since the highQ features are smoothed-over that low, it looks a bit rough here.
Additional EQ to get the bass into shape is dialed in on the mains directly:

JoMI6Qu.jpeg



Now I'm just stuck with the mains as subs, which introduces further phase issues, since the AVR doesn't apply an all-pass filter on the incoming LR channels, so corelated information from LR&bass managed channels will create cancellations at the crossover frequencies. Crazy how lacklustre the implementation of this dsp is. I would've thought the team behind Audyssey/Denon had known better.

Overall really disappointing, but I can see the potential between a proper setup with XT32, actual physical subs and a custom .ady file made from REW. That should yield pretty good results, but that's probably also the only shot you have at getting truly good sound out of Audyssey.
 
Back
Top Bottom