Denon AVR-X4700 AVR Review (Updated)

[da Choge]

I would think for best results, keep them as two separate system. Unless you mean using some sort of HT bypass so that for two channel listening you bypass the Denon altogether?

Been off the site for a couple of days, but, yes, the Anthem STR has a Home Theater Bypass mode and I would be using the amplification of the STR for my front two channels (even when using the AVR, which currently is a Marantz SR7012 -- its front R & L channel pre-outs would feed the bypass input of the STR, while the Marantz itself would use its internal amp for the remaining 5 of the 7 channels). For pure stereo listening, the Marantz wouldn't even be in the chain; direct from DAC to STR. I will setup up the Parasound HINT 6 (also an integrated with an HT Bypass mode) the same way with my upstairs Marantz SR6014. To be clear, I haven't acquired either the Anthem or the Parasound as of yet, but will probably be getting the Parasound in the next couple of months. The Anthem, which is a little more pricey, is down the road a bit - the other alternative would be the new NAD preamp, but it's not even out yet.

 

[da Choge]

. . . Integrated Amp with HT-Bypass such as the Parasound HINT6 . . .

Well, what do ya know -- exactly how I intend on completing my upstairs set up (referred to in the post just above). I answered another poster's (peng's) question before I even got to your post. I trust you are satisfied with your setup?

 

[davidc]

If you are asking about NC252MP, it is actually rated 150Wrms/ch at 8 ohms and 250Wrms/ch at 4 ohms. Check the specs on page 6:

https://vtvamplifier.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NC252MP_02xx.pdf

NAD is one amp manufacturer I know that usually rate their amps the same at 4 and 8 ohms. When the rating is the same at both load resistance, it means the power section does not give out more at lower impedance load. I would say it's a bad thing. I would also say that regardless of the brand, the power rating should be slightly different at 4 and 8 ohms. Some brands just choose to publish the same numbers for marketing reasons - to state that their amp's performance is the same regardless of load.

This is interesting about NAD, as, if I remember correctly, back a few decades ago they used to advocate a very high dynamic headroom and had amps with up to 3dB of dynamic headroom (using the standard FTC guidelines back then).

 

[Chromatischism]

Ratbuddysey lets you do the same thing with Audyssey.

Yes - I was simply adding that because it was mentioned that Dirac could not, when it fact it can.

 

[peng]

Dirac allows you to load in a target curve .txt file. So you can save a curve, then go in and manually edit the values at each point, then load the file. I agree this is far better than drawing and dragging.

Okay, I didn't know that when I was doing the trial. I am still interested in it but it would be just for fun if I go for it eventually just for my two channel system. For sound quality, I know Dirac or not it won't make a difference because the only difference I can see is that with Audyssey running, the sampling frequency would be limited to 48 kHz regardless; and I absolutely do not believe sampling frequency alone would make an audible difference. I can't even hear a sine wave tone at 15 khz or lower without cranking the volume impractically high, so 15 to 20,000 Hz is more than adequate for me. 48 kHz sampling will guarantee nothing gets lost up to 24 kHz anyway, ommv..

 

[Daniel0]

If true, only if, Audyssey XT32 isn't as bad as people think they are, and they are/were perceived badly, probably fairly because of their limitations in not having the flexibility for customization that they now offer, via the $20 App. The 3rd party UI is just a bonus, albeit to me it is an indispensable tool for those who like to play.

Theres also better accuracy in the calculation with the Audyssey App which improves the result considerably if it's running on a capable mobile device.
The App also takes your mobile device into account, you only get the best results with a fairly capable device, so a super cheap android won't give you the best results but it should still be better than the Receiver.

From my experience the most common mistakes are made with the measurement. People seem to make mistakes doing it the quick and easy way with Audyssey while they take a lot more care with solutions like Dirac and Anthem ARC maybe because they are inherently more complex.
If the same care would be taken for Audyssey then you wouldn't have countless threads/opinions complaining about Audyssey results.

 

[peng]

I've been reading Amir's work and subsequent forum commentary over the last 6 months. I greatly appreciate his effort to shed light on how well things work "under the hood", and the usually constructive dialog that results.

I’ve read this entire review/thread and am having a hard time wrapping my head around some of the issues. Here’s what (I think) concerns me and my understanding of the issues:

1. Downmix/HDMI issue- It’s hard to figure out the applicable circumstances. I run a 7.2.2 ch. Yamaha system (looking at Denon for 7.4.2 at some point). Source components are all HDMI; outputting multichannel movies/TV/SACD (BD/Dish/Roku) and stereo (BD-CD and Rasp Pi). I listen to stereo as stereo, and may use zone 2 for stereo in the future. Does it sound like the issue is applicable with my usage?

2. Pre-out “off-load”- Per Amir in the review: “We see the typical high harmonic distortion due to internal amplifier stressing the power supply causing the DAC to underperform. Fortunately in this amplifier we can turn them off for the fronts…” (1)

Just to clarify. Is this an input signal routing or an amplifier power configuration option (or both)? Are the pre-outs always “hot” or does disabling the amps then route the signal to them? If they are always “hot”, the performance advantage is achieved, not just by “jacking in” to the pre-out, but also requires disabling the amplifier(s). The 2 “routing/disabling” options are “L/R” and “all”.

• What is happening to the “off-loaded” and improved L/R DAC performance when the 7 other amplifier channels are in use? (It’s not clear to me if they were driven during the review).
• What do the 9 other DAC and 7 amp channels look like when L/R has been “off-loaded” (reduced power supply load)? Are they also improved (distortion/headroom…)? Is it possible to sample check DAC/amp channels- C, L sur, R height? Probably too late…
• Related but not exclusive to the discussion above. Could anyone comment on the relative power requirements and utilization of L/R vs. C vs. surround (yes I realize this is source/mastering dependent). Any sense of the generalized value of offloading L/R or L/C/R from a receiver and the subsequent reduction of power supply load. I would think there would potentially be large advantages in the remaining channels amplifier headroom, power supply loading (system), heat, and potential crosstalk (EMI). Off-loading all amplification would of course maximize all of the above.

3. 1.1/1.4V preout (best/max)- Seems on the thin side, but workable with most of the amps I’m looking at. Is the blue trace in the attached “Pre-out w/ amps on/off” graph (near the end of the new part of the review) reflective of “L/R” or “all” amps off. If “all”, what would it look like with only L/R off? A realistic usage scenario.

I would like to try answering some of your questions and trust someone would correct me if I am wrong in any way.

1. My understanding is that the "bug" would add noise but only if you send a signal with more channels than the number of speakers you configure for. So if you send 2 channel information, such as play the two channel track on a 7.1 SACD you are fine, but you play the 5.1, 7.1, presumably even 3.1 via HDMI but configure your AVR for only 2 speakers, then you will get that "bug" effects. For me, I always leave my AVR speaker configuration in 7.1.4 so I should be fine regardless.

So again, basically if the number of channels send via HDMI matches, or is less than the number of speakers configured you won't get degradation.

2. The pre-outs are always hot, when we talked about "disconnected" the internal power amps, it means disconnect the pre-out signal from the power amp input, not powering off the power amp. So both the pre-outs and the power amp power rails are hot, just the signal flow gets disconnected. That's why you can disconnect the front left and right pre-outs to the internal left and right channel power amps and still use the remaining internal power amp channels to power the center, surround and height/atmos speakers.

• The improved performance of the disconnected L/R pre-outs should not be affected by the use of internal amps (not 7, but all 9 of them).
• The pre-out performance improvements only apply the the L/R that you disconnect, unless you use the pre-amp mode that disconnect all channels power amp
• I think I have done enough experiments to say that the center channel woudl have the highest average loading, as you said just in general.

Amir said it was the power supply being stressed that caused the degraded preamp performance when the power amps clip, he may be right, but my own speculation is that it was the distortions from the power amp clipping that caused the preamp degradation, that is, directly, vs via the "stress" power supply. My reasoning is: a) the preamp section has its own power supply, b) if it is from the power supply being stressed, then it would still be stressed by the other channels especially the center channel, when in use, c) power supply shouldn't be stressed as such if it is just voltage clipping with no load current (during bench tests with no speakers connected), and d) Other AVRs such as Anthem's, don't have larger power supplies, in fact I would say smaller based on collaborating evidence (their bench test results) and they don't degrade that significantly at above 2 V, but Denon and Yamaha's did.

3. The blue and red curves for with the internal amps disconnected, either the L/R using the amp assign feature, or the pre-amp mode that disconnects all channels and the curves would therefor apply to the L/R only or all channels accordingly. The dark and light green curves are for with the internal amps connected.

 

[Gyroscopics]

Well, what do ya know -- exactly how I intend on completing my upstairs set up (referred to in the post just above). I answered another poster's (peng's) question before I even got to your post. I trust you are satisfied with your setup?

I've had it for 5 years since getting the HINT (1st gen). I'm so satisfied that I've already rotated speakers and AVRs but kept my HT-Bypass HINT and another Parasound Amp (bridged at 400 watts) for center.

 

[Gyroscopics]

This is interesting about NAD, as, if I remember correctly, back a few decades ago they used to advocate a very high dynamic headroom and had amps with up to 3dB of dynamic headroom (using the standard FTC guidelines back then).

NAD usually under-quote their power rating and does not report separate 4ohm rating even if the amp is capable of higher watts at 4 ohm load. Most importantly, NAD posts RMS power rating, not PEAK rating unlike the majority. My NAD 375 BEE is rated 150W rms/ch but 3rd party measurements show that this beast actually pushes 200W rms. The NAD C268 reviewed by Amir here at ASR only touts 80W/ch. That's only RMS though, but the UcD module underneath is capable of higher peak wattage. I like NAD, if only their volume and balance pots last longer. Mine already shows imbalanced balance pot and leaks creeking sound in the music when the volume pot is moved.

 

[kokishin]

Full pre-amp mode is one shared relay for all channels. For you to be able to shut down individual channels you would need a separate relay for each. Relays take space, cost money and use up current while on. So I am pretty sure there is no support beyond what is given to us.

For total pre-amp mode flexibility, wouldn't a multipole relay be used for each pair of amps? If so, then it would require a total of six relays to disconnect any pair of amps, the center amp, or all amps. If the FL/FR/C used the same relay, then that nets out to five relays. Doesn't mean that additional relays don't cost more, take up real estate, and use more power, but it seems more manageable than a relay per amp. HST, If the 4700H allows some amp pairs to be remapped to some internal pre-outs, then that could result in more relays being needed.

 

[Vasr]

From my experience the most common mistakes are made with the measurement. People seem to make mistakes doing it the quick and easy way with Audyssey while they take a lot more care with solutions like Dirac and Anthem ARC maybe because they are inherently more complex.
If the same care would be taken for Audyssey then you wouldn't have countless threads/opinions complaining about Audyssey results.

I am not sure I buy that having used all of them. What exactly are the mistakes being made in one but not the other?

If you just to do the Auto EQ with measurement (no mucking around with target curves), Dirac insists on a lot more minimum required positions for the same living room scenario (which increases the chances of messing up). Otherwise, there is not much difference in the procedure to mess up one but not the other.

ARC gave much better results in tonal balance by default than Audyssey in the exact same room setup. But this is because the auto target curve for ARC was not as flat as the one chosen by default for Audyssey and includes some room gain and a slope (may be based on the measurements too). Audyssey seemed to use a much flatter curve that isn't always the best sounding and bass sounded weak (a common complaint). Dirac auto target curve was somewhat similar to Audyssey and suffered from the same weak bass but it was much better in clarity and in a multi-channel setup did a much better job of seamless integration of surrounds and mains than the other two (this may have more to do with their time-domain corrections than measurements - mistakes or not).

In my experiments, ARC and Dirac were not as sensitive to the relative positioning of the mic during the measurements. Audyssey (the XT32 version is what I tried) was extremely sensitive and the AVS forum wisdom was that it needs to be fairly tight around the MLP to get the best EQ. This does imply that it is easier to "mess up" the measurements with Audyssey but that is not user error, but a quirk of the system that is much more sensitive to the mic position.

If you get into tweaking the target curve, all of them needed some technical understanding of what is going on and you could get the best out of them if you did. All of them were terrible if you didn't know what you were doing.

 

[raistlin65]

In my experiments, ARC and Dirac were not as sensitive to the relative positioning of the mic during the measurements. Audyssey (the XT32 version is what I tried) was extremely sensitive and the AVS forum wisdom was that it needs to be fairly tight around the MLP to get the best EQ. This does imply that it is easier to "mess up" the measurements with Audyssey but that is not user error, but a quirk of the system that is much more sensitive to the mic position.

Or because of the cheap mic itself which likely costs Sound United only $1 or $2 to manufacture.

 

[krizvi786]

Denon 3700 out now just fyi..mine is on the way..

 

[bobopich]

Or because of the cheap mic itself which likely costs Sound United only $1 or $2 to manufacture.

I have compared the measurments I made with the mic from Denon x3600 to the ones I have made with umik-1 in Rew and also Dirac and they were quite similar nothing disturbing. I was able to compare them thanks to ratbuddussay.

 

[peng]

In my experiments, ARC and Dirac were not as sensitive to the relative positioning of the mic during the measurements. Audyssey (the XT32 version is what I tried) was extremely sensitive and the AVS forum wisdom was that it needs to be fairly tight around the MLP to get the best EQ. This does imply that it is easier to "mess up" the measurements with Audyssey but that is not user error, but a quirk of the system that is much more sensitive to the mic position.

I read those AVSF posts too so I know what you are talking about. The interesting thing is, I have plotted hundreds of graphs with REW from a huge number of Audyssey run and I could not duplicate the issues that those folks at AVSF experience. The only thing is, my experiments were done mostly within the last 3-4 years, may be Audyssey did make some changes since 2015 without saying anything? I also read about Mathew's review on how Audyssey supposedly messed up that he discovered by measuring the listening window. Him and Gene had made a Y-tube window on that topic too, but again, I tried, and could not see such mess up, though he used a totally different procedure.

I really don't know, all I know is I am getting +/- 3 dB or so, and +/- 1 dB or even less if I apply 1/12 smoothing, can't get better as it reaches the Umik-1 mic's tolerance/accuracy already so I don't know how Anthem ARC could help me. Oh, I measured the listening window (sort of) too by moving the mic left, right, up, down 6 to 10 inches etc., and for the most part the average curve looks really good. I could have easily modified the target using the App+Ratbuddyssey+REW (just for verification) to have gradual rise towards 10 Hz but I kind of like the flat curve so far.

 

[peng]

For total pre-amp mode flexibility, wouldn't a multipole relay be used for each pair of amps? If so, then it would require a total of six relays to disconnect any pair of amps, the center amp, or all amps. If the FL/FR/C used the same relay, then that nets out to five relays. Doesn't mean that additional relays don't cost more, take up real estate, and use more power, but it seems more manageable than a relay per amp. HST, If the 4700H allows some amp pairs to be remapped to some internal pre-outs, then that could result in more relays being needed.

Amir said full preamp mode uses one shared relay for all channels, but I don't know if that is his educated guess or he knows it for fact. Could you take a look of my post#434 and let me know if you think the use of the NJU72750 multiplexer IC switch is also a possibility? That switch is currently used by Denon and Marantz for the amp assign functions already, so i thought it may be possible that they used a couple of them for the preamp mode as well, along with the amp assign functions.

 

[shellback]

Denon 3700 out now just fyi..mine is on the way..

Are you sending yours to Amir for testing? Or do you mean on it's way to you?

I'm looking at the X3700H right now and reallllly close to hitting the buy button.

 

[krizvi786]

Are you sending yours to Amir for testing? Or do you mean on it's way to you?

I'm looking at the X3700H right now and reallllly close to hitting the buy button.

sorry on the way to me . I though amir said he already had one on the way to him

 

[amirm]

sorry on the way to me . I though amir said he already had one on the way to him

I have a local member that is supposed to get one. So we are good.

 

[Daniel0]

@Vasr

I read those AVSF posts too so I know what you are talking about.

I don't know what exactly Vasr is talking about but it sounds really flowery to me.

I prefer objective measurements and somewhat recent tests. Because since the Audyssey App came out a lot has changed. There are more options now and the accuracy was improved considerably.
There is a comparison on AVSF? that compares the systems with REW and Audyssey was very competitive there.

A very recent test was done on this forum and Audyssey got a recommendation from Amir:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/audyssey-room-eq-review.12746/

We have yet to see him test Dirac or Anthem Room Correction but i suspect the differences will be small.

But instead of investing a lot of money in Dirac DSPs or anything like that (minidsp etc) you should do something to improve the room acoustics which makes a much bigger difference than any of those software systems.
And if the room is somewhat optimized then the differences between the software systems get even smaller.