Denon 3803 or 3805 (1 Viewer)

[Larry J]

I am building a home theater in my basement. I am using paradigm monitor 7 speakers, Mitsubishi WS-55511 HD television, Toshiba Progressive Scan DVD Player, Direct TV, and a Sony Mega CD/DVD/SACD player. I recently purchased the Denon 3803 on sale for $740.00. I am wondering if it would be worth the extra %500.00 to upgrade to the Denon AVR 3805 (Tweeter has the upgrade policy). Any help appreciated.

 

[Yogi]

For the $500 you could get a used 125Wx5 outboard amplifier and beat the 3805 by a wide margin in performance and sound, IMHO.

My 2 green cents.

 

[BrianAe]

In general, I agree with Yogi. However, if your running a 7.1 system you might find that its worth it to upgrade to get DPLIIx. Also, Tweeter should be able to get you the 3805 for less than 500 bucks difference. I'd say even half that wouldn't be out of the question.

 

[Tom_Link]

The 3803 is a great receiver and $500 is a lot of money. I can only say that the auto EQ feature of the 3805 provides noticable improvement to the overall sound. This requires the optional mike, of course. The 3805 has an 8 band parametric equalizer on every channel. The auto EQ process automatically sets the EQ on every channel to balance speaker perfomance and room acoustics. This measurement process could not be done by ear alone. The results are impressive.