And here I am sitting in India looking forward to buy a nice warm sounding AVR with only 5.1 DTS HD-MA/DOlby True HD suport and 100 W per channel Primarily for movies.
I have done that in the past and people complain that the zone 2 is often using an inferior DAC.
@amirm, Do you now how high the volume on the Denon was for the full power tests? I'm looking for the point that distortion and noise saturates the signal.
As you said this model "seems to predate some of this grief and appears sound," maybe the same is true of the preamp DAC used here - I and I'm sure many others would be curious to know and much appreciate the zone 2 pre-outs being tested on this unit.
My brand!
This was my receiver. Bought for $600 from ListenUp in 2016. It was replaced with a T758 v3 which I think sounds MUCH better,
"think" is the key word.
Dirac would make a difference for sure. In pure direct, I would think the two would likely sound more similar than different on all else being equal basis. The Denon has lower distortions, but the NAD's were low enough imo..
Why would Zone 2 need a separate DAC when it can simply route analogue signal from a DAC that drives primary zone to a dedicated volume control followed by opamp acting as output buffer to the Zone 2 output?
Doing it with additional inferior DAC is simplly a bad engineering.
I thought they needed the second DAC so that Z2 could play from a different source than the main zone simultaneously but I could be wrong. By the way, Yamaha, NAD and Onkyo (probably all others) do the same, i.e. separate DAC for Z2/3, and/or Network/USB.
The old addage "all amps sound the same" is likely true for 99% of consumer systems due to placement, use of lower-sensitivity speakers, other bottlenecks etc."think" is the key word.
Dirac would make a difference for sure. In pure direct, I would think the two would likely sound more similar than different on all else being equal basis. The Denon has lower distortions, but the NAD's were low enough imo..
I highly doubt that because:
a) The vol control chip predate the updated dedicated chip that replaced the LSI (large scale integrated) chip that has 2X the distortions.
b) The dac also predated the upgraded AK4458 in the AVR-X2300W (2016 and newer) and higher models, the same one used in the so called higher end AVRs such as the Anthem MRX-1120.
The zone 2 DAC is the PCM5100, the specs of which are definitely not as good as the main DAC, the PCM1690. That's based on info in the service manuals.
You can see that the X3500H (two model years newer) has quite a bit better SINAD.
No. Digital sources after DAC together with analog sources are routed in parallel to 3 switches: one is listening switch to select input for primary zone, the other is recording switch to select what to record and 3rd is a Zone2 switch to select input for Zone 2.
My Rotel processor does it that way.
If you want to play a difference source in say zone 2, while watching 7.1 (8 channels) movie in the main zone, it does not matter how many routing switches you are still limited by the 8 channel PCM1690 right? What did I miss?
Interesting, thanks for the info. I still think it would be good to have actual measurements of the pre-outs of this unit to determine the preamp DAC's performance definitively. On-paper specs are sometimes trumped/ruined by good/poor implementation, which can result in newer not necessarily being better.
By the way, do you have any details on how Denon's AVR-X2400H might differ from this X2200W or the X3500H, and a link to the service manuals of each?
Sure, but such designs have DACs with enough channels to accomodate number of multichannels + 2 channels for Zone2.
In that case of course one would be enough. I am simply referring to 8 channel DACs typically found in AVRs such as D&M's including their non flagship prepros such as the AV7704. Some may not not prefer DACs with more than 8 channels though, in fact some may even push for the use of 2 channel/stereo DACs like the ones used in the AV8805 and AVR-X8500H (8 pieces).
Implementation is an important factor but in this case, the difference in specs between the PCM5100 (zone 2) and the AK4458 (main zone) is huge.
When you say you "would never buy such product," can I assume that you will never buy an AVR regardless of price? The problem with this entire segment (AVRs) is that every product out there is compromised compared to stereo specific products, even from the same manufacturer. And the reason why is quite simple: 99.9% of people buying AVRs use it for home theater not critical music listening. In a home theater environment where visual stimuli is overwhelming, your critical listening skills diminish to zero, and you're just enjoying the "movie watching experience" without ever noticing that the SINAD is less than a $9 Apple dongle. Sure it would be great if measurements were better, but for real world consumers, such improvements would neither be noticed or appreciated. As a matter of fact, if you told its target audience that DTS-X will be eliminated so that more money could be put into engineering higher sound quality, consumers would choose another product that had DTS-X.DACs and op-amps are cheap, saving on them is a sign of bad engineering or a sign that good engineers were pushed to work with budget been too tight. I would never buy such product as who knows what other compromises have been made.
I didn't make a specific note of it. But I did start at max volume and it had huge amount of gain and clipped badly. I then pulled it way down. I want to say 80 on the volume control but not 100% sure. My bad for not noting it on the measurements.@amirm, Do you now how high the volume on the Denon was for the full power tests? I'm looking for the point that distortion and noise saturates the signal.