This is a review and detailed measurements of the Denon DRA-800H Stereo AV Receiver. It was kindly purchased used by a member and drop shipped to me. It costs new US $599 from Amazon including Prime shipping.
The front looks like any multi-channel receiver:
Then you look in the back and realize it is just stereo:
There is significant weight saving here. I had no trouble picking up the unit and carrying it around.
Note that unlike stereo integrated amplifiers here you have HDMI input and DSP for bass management and such. You are basically saving money and space if you just need stereo output for your TV setup.
During use, I was surprised how hot the unit got. I was hoping that in two channel form factor it would run a lot cooler but it did not. I could literally smell the hot metal due to cheap thin heatsinks that are so common in these AVRs/Receivers.
Denon DRA-800H DAC Measurements
I always try to separate the DAC from the rest of AVR to see how well it performs. It was kind of hard here since there is no traditional pre-amp out. Rather, there is Zone 2 which can program to mirror the main zone output so that is what I did. I then fed the unit over HDMI and got our dashboard:
SINAD which is a combined measure of noise and distortion is dominated by the latter, placing the DRA-800H in our "poor" category:
Noise is not great either:
We can't even convey CD's 16 bit noise floor without adding to it.
Output goes much higher than nominal 2 volt I measure so let's see the impact of that:
Sadly, you can't get anything better. If you turn up the volume, you loose performance right away. The gain staging here is pretty low quality.
Despite high noise floor which should hide a ton of sins, we still see some jitter spikes:
Intermodulation test shows really poor performance, matching that of a throw-away phone headphone dongle:
Linearity is some of the worst I have measured:
DAC filter response is typical as far as cut off frequency (slightly too wide) but doesn't attenuation nearly as much as it should:
This causes severe penalty when we measure many frequencies with wide, 90 kHz bandwidth:
Upping the sample rate to 192 kHz eliminates the impact of the filter but we are still in the dog house as far as performance.
Finally, here is our multitone:
Denon DRA-800H Amplifier Measurements
AVRs are a pain to evaluate since they usually act different depending on whether you enable digital processing on analog input or not. This was no exception. Let's first start with analog in but in Pure Direct mode which should eliminate all processing:
This is about average for all amplifiers measured to date and below that of competing AVRs:
Let's put the unit in "Stereo" mode whereby DSP capabilities are available:
So you lose about 5 dB of performance.
Let's feed the unit digital data over HDMI and see how it does:
After this measurement, I went back to analog input and was shocked to see performance remain just as bad as digital!
I power cycled it and problem went away.
Here is our signal to noise ratio with analog input and Pure Direct:
Not bad. Here it is if you allow signal processing and hence digitization:
Seeing how this is common mode of operation, performance here is quite poor.
Frequency response test shows the effect of input digitization:
Anyway, let's see how much power we have:
Unhappy about the rise of distortion there. Fortunately there is some good news in the form of good headroom:
Finally, the amplifier is well behaved albeit, with high noise floor:
Conclusions
From form factor point of view, I wish this was a slim unit as the size is my biggest issue in deploying AVRs in the living room for two channel music and TV playback. Heat is the other which sadly this unit generates fair bit of it.
Objective performance ranges from poor to unremarkable. If you need it just TV sound, it is probably fine but you won't be able to show it off to your audiophile friends saying such a great product it is. Because it isn't.
I can't recommend the Denon DRA-800H. Company can and should do better than this. Build an audiophile class 2-channel integrated amplifier with DSP and HDMI input and you will have a very unique and desirable product.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The front looks like any multi-channel receiver:
Then you look in the back and realize it is just stereo:
There is significant weight saving here. I had no trouble picking up the unit and carrying it around.
Note that unlike stereo integrated amplifiers here you have HDMI input and DSP for bass management and such. You are basically saving money and space if you just need stereo output for your TV setup.
During use, I was surprised how hot the unit got. I was hoping that in two channel form factor it would run a lot cooler but it did not. I could literally smell the hot metal due to cheap thin heatsinks that are so common in these AVRs/Receivers.
Denon DRA-800H DAC Measurements
I always try to separate the DAC from the rest of AVR to see how well it performs. It was kind of hard here since there is no traditional pre-amp out. Rather, there is Zone 2 which can program to mirror the main zone output so that is what I did. I then fed the unit over HDMI and got our dashboard:
SINAD which is a combined measure of noise and distortion is dominated by the latter, placing the DRA-800H in our "poor" category:
Noise is not great either:
We can't even convey CD's 16 bit noise floor without adding to it.
Output goes much higher than nominal 2 volt I measure so let's see the impact of that:
Sadly, you can't get anything better. If you turn up the volume, you loose performance right away. The gain staging here is pretty low quality.
Despite high noise floor which should hide a ton of sins, we still see some jitter spikes:
Intermodulation test shows really poor performance, matching that of a throw-away phone headphone dongle:
Linearity is some of the worst I have measured:
DAC filter response is typical as far as cut off frequency (slightly too wide) but doesn't attenuation nearly as much as it should:
This causes severe penalty when we measure many frequencies with wide, 90 kHz bandwidth:
Upping the sample rate to 192 kHz eliminates the impact of the filter but we are still in the dog house as far as performance.
Finally, here is our multitone:
Denon DRA-800H Amplifier Measurements
AVRs are a pain to evaluate since they usually act different depending on whether you enable digital processing on analog input or not. This was no exception. Let's first start with analog in but in Pure Direct mode which should eliminate all processing:
This is about average for all amplifiers measured to date and below that of competing AVRs:
Let's put the unit in "Stereo" mode whereby DSP capabilities are available:
So you lose about 5 dB of performance.
Let's feed the unit digital data over HDMI and see how it does:
After this measurement, I went back to analog input and was shocked to see performance remain just as bad as digital!
I power cycled it and problem went away.
Here is our signal to noise ratio with analog input and Pure Direct:
Not bad. Here it is if you allow signal processing and hence digitization:
Seeing how this is common mode of operation, performance here is quite poor.
Frequency response test shows the effect of input digitization:
Anyway, let's see how much power we have:
Unhappy about the rise of distortion there. Fortunately there is some good news in the form of good headroom:
Finally, the amplifier is well behaved albeit, with high noise floor:
Conclusions
From form factor point of view, I wish this was a slim unit as the size is my biggest issue in deploying AVRs in the living room for two channel music and TV playback. Heat is the other which sadly this unit generates fair bit of it.
Objective performance ranges from poor to unremarkable. If you need it just TV sound, it is probably fine but you won't be able to show it off to your audiophile friends saying such a great product it is. Because it isn't.
I can't recommend the Denon DRA-800H. Company can and should do better than this. Build an audiophile class 2-channel integrated amplifier with DSP and HDMI input and you will have a very unique and desirable product.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/