I was thinking exactly that reading through the results. There is no way they even set any quantitative project targets. It seems like the 3600 was either purely an accident/fluke or 1 team/project lead gave a shit one time, which is also an accident but at a company level.
Please keep in mind I know nothing about Denon or the usual structure of companies in the audio industry. I do know a thing or two (not much more) about working at a very large OEM (as well as suppliers), which uses in house designed and made parts as well as many supplier made parts. So, I'm making some extrapolations here. I would venture to gamble that any company this large has to pick a strategy of how much or specifically what they are going to do in house VS spec to supplier. At least they should try to intelligently chose a strategy hopefully based on what they are good at doing, what is critical for them to do VS not so critical, but some are probably just also falling into it by accident. So some companies say they are good at... specifying parts to put together? It's entirely possible that Denon is not designing or making a single actual part inside of that unit. Even then it is still up to the OEM to make a solid thorough spec, test and hold the suppliers accountable to the spec, as well as the obvious final fully assembled unit performance. But at some point when you go to far down the rabbit hole of using only supplier parts the job starts to morph from engineer to project manager. IMHO when you get too many of those, things start to fall apart.
Man, these have been disappointing and it's clear there is a bevy of folks hungry for another very good and not even great performer. Its gotta be tough to be in the market for AVRs right now
