Hooking Up Denon My X4300H (1 Viewer)

[Scott Merryfield]

And yes, in general Atmos tracks even without real or fake height speakers sound better than stock DD or DTS to me

That is what surprised me with my first Atmos experience with the Denon X3300. I was expecting to get something similar to what I got with Dolby TrueHD on my old Pioneer Elite, but this was much more immersive playing Atmos on the Denon. It was one of those "wow" moments. I need to play a few more discs with different formats so make any final judgment, but my first impression was extremely positive.

 

[Sam Posten]

Scott look for a pm

 

[Scott Merryfield]

We watched the Blu-ray of the musical Chicago tonight with some friends who had never seen the film. I noticed a more immersive sound with the Dolby TrueHD track than I remember with my old Pioneer -- I have watched this movie numerous times, as it's a favorite of both mine and my wife's. The Denon brought new life to the film for me, although I did need to turn on the lip synch adjustment for my Panasonic BD player. So, what I thought may have been the Denon simulating the Atmos height channels when watching Underworld may just be Audyssey doing a better job of room correction and better overall sound quality with the new Denon than MCAAC with my old Pioneer. I still need to check out more films before making any final conclusion, but so far this new Denon is really shining.

 

[Robert Crawford]

We watched the Blu-ray of the musical Chicago tonight with some friends who had never seen the film. I noticed a more immersive sound with the Dolby TrueHD track than I remember with my old Pioneer -- I have watched this movie numerous times, as it's a favorite of both mine and my wife's. The Denon brought new life to the film for me, although I did need to turn on the lip synch adjustment for my Panasonic BD player. So, what I thought may have been the Denon simulating the Atmos height channels when watching Underworld may just be Audyssey doing a better job of room correction and better overall sound quality with the new Denon than MCAAC with my old Pioneer. I still need to check out more films before making any final conclusion, but so far this new Denon is really shining.

Interesting that you would play that BD on your BD player instead of the Sony 4K/UHD player.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Interesting that you would play that BD on your BD player instead of the Sony 4K/UHD player.

The primary reason I used the Panny BD player was I have not played any BDs on the Sony UHD deck yet, and I knew Chicago would play without any glitches on the Panny. Since we had friends over, I didn't want to deal with any potential playback issues and ruin their movie watching experience. As it turns out, I did have pause the disc briefly to turn on the lip synch adjustment, but fortunately that was quite quick (and I used the opportunity to grab a couple more beers ). Even my wife noticed the sound and video were slightly out of synch.

I doubt I will see much, if any, difference in BD playback between the Panny BD and Sony UHD players, but I still plan on trying out the Sony. My Vizio display does an excellent job upconverting 1080p content to 4K. The Sony does load discs faster, though, which would be a benefit -- especially with those horribly authored Universal BDs that take forever to load due to all the crap you have to go through before getting to the actual film.

What I am really interesting in comparing is SD-DVD playback on my Oppo vs. the Sony UHD. The Vizio display does not upconvert 480i/p content nearly as well as it does 1080p content. Up until now, I have been letting the Oppo upconvert to 1080p and then the Vizio upconverts again to 4K, which better than a single upconvert on the Vizio. So I want to compare letting the Denon receiver upconvert the 480 content via the Oppo to 4K versus having the Sony UHD do the complete upconversion to 4K. Either way, I'm hoping I will get better results that the current double conversion that is occurring.