Denon AVR-X3400H A/V Receiver
When seven is enough. by Daniel Kumin
PRICE $999
DENON’S NEW AVR-X3400H A/V receiver scored points with me even before I got it out of its box: The four-piece packaging foam (top/ bottom front and back) allows for easy removal of a heavy-ish item without battling box flaps, splintering full end-cap pieces, or leaving a trail of Styrofoam crumbs behind. (Yes, I’m packing-material obsessive.) But let me not prejudge.
Once out of the box, the AVR-X3400H appeared as a familiar example of the receiver genus: black chassis, lots of jacks, two knobs, and a few buttons. (Denon has—sensibly, in my view—abandoned most front-panel controls other than source select and volume. So don’t lose that remote control!) At $999, this sevenchannel receiver slots in just above the middle of Denon’s 11-model lineup, which means it features most of the good stuff at a price that’s about a quarter of Denon's new $3,999 flagship, the AVR-X8500H.
What good stuff? To wit: Dolby Atmos and DTS:X object-oriented surround (along with the addition last fall of DTS:X Virtual height effects), video scaling of SD/HD analog video to 4K with 4K/HDR passthrough, hi-res readiness up to 192/32 PCM and including (two-channel) DSD 2.8 and 5.6 megahertz, audio streaming that accommodates your DLNA media and TuneIn internet radio as well as all the usual services (Pandora, Tidal, Deezer, etc.) and a few less common (Amazon Music and Sound-Cloud, none built in, but all via the free HEOS app), and compatibility with Denon’s well-regarded HEOS multiroom ecosystem, for wireless. Plus, of course, Bluetooth and Apple AirPlay.
And the AVR-X3400H accumulated more points when I hooked it up. Although its speaker outputs are only medium-duty and plastic-knobbed, they are all U.S. standard, half-inchspaced pairs of multi-way binding posts. This means that the dualbanana connectors terminating my surrounds and a pair of front Atmos speakers plugged right in without requiring test-lead kludging. (Some designs use wider spacing, apparently to avoid confusion with the power plugs used in other countries. Yikes!) After I connected a few HDMI cables, the seven speaker cables, and the subwoofer line cable for a front-height Atmos setup, it was on to calibration.
Denon provides a colorful graphic setup guide that hand-holds the novice through the basics of layout and connection. (It’s easily skipped.) Better still—more points!—Denon gifts the AVR-X3400H with Audyssey calibration and speaker/room correction, rather than a proprietary system (as do more and more competitors today). And not just plain-vanilla Audyssey but MultEQ XT32, which collects microphone data from eight listening locations and incorporates higher-performance filters than lower-ranked Audyssey versions. This ran as expected but provided no option to escape with fewer than the full eight mic placements. Nor did it offer visual or tabular data as to equalizations or corrections. (Audyssey’s iOS/Android MultEQ app, however, adds both of these and much more. It's a $20 add with this model but still highly recommended.)
The receiver’s Audyssey setup does offer the familiar Reference and Flat equalization options. There’s also Audyssey Dynamic EQ, which interactively modifies the shaping and balancing for the lower-thanreference levels that nearly all of us employ nearly all of the time. (Many audiophiles probably defeat this in their setup options. My advice: Don’t until you’ve tried it.) Then there’s Dynamic Volume, one of the best “smart-loudness-contour” implementations out there.
The setup routine mostly proceeded smoothly. But in a couple of instances, the wait for the receiver’s software to respond to a Next or Back command via onscreen buttons was extremely long: minutes (or very nearly), rather than seconds. I can’t say whether this was a processing delay, a software glitch, or a frozen response to an unexpected input. (One instance occurred when my sub’s level was too high, requiring attenuation at the sub, which the onscreen meter showed and which I performed. The onscreen display moved in real time, but neither the Next nor the Back button would respond for such a long interval that I thought the unit had locked up. It hadn’t. So, a couple of points deducted.)
However, the setup results were entirely positive, as I generally expect for higher-version Audyssey. As usual, the most obvious impact of the Reference setting, which shapes all speakers to a target curve, was a relatively modest focusing of midrange textures, a similarly slight tightening of all but the last octave or
so of bass, and an expanding of the surround bubble. This last was more pronounced than the result of some other Audyssey runs I’ve performed, probably because of the Atmos effect: The crowd sound on an
NFL game was quite organic and believable. (Spoiler: The Patriots won.) As always, I did all the rest of my listening with Audyssey defeated, since it’s unrealistic to expect the results with one speaker/room combination to translate to every other.
Listening, Viewing
The power amplifier sections of Denon’s AVRs have acquired a solid reputation among subjectivists for good sound, and I will offer nothing here to contradict them. Beginning with plain, full-range (no subwoofer) stereo listening, I found the AVRX3400H eminently capable of producing appropriate seriouslistening levels from my antique-butable Energy three-way monitors. These modest-sensitivity loudspeakers are probably 2 to 4 decibels less so than typical designs today, yet the receiver produced amply satisfying quantity and quality on a rotation of hi-res files streaming from my desktop iMac. For just one example, the Denon had oomph to spare to present a DSD of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, at piano-bench levels without strain or harshness—no mean feat—and with no sign of congestion from the first movement’s powerful, closely voiced, even dissonant left-hand chords, nor any trace of noise across Ludwig’s mad dynamics extremes.
In the rock realm, I cued up an SACD of the Rolling Stones classic
Let It Bleed and cranked up “Monkey Man” to dorm-room-party levels (I was only following the instruction printed in the liner notes). This remastering has a certain heft and midrange smoothness, or at least less-rawness, that was lacking on the original CD release, along with a decided extra layer of cymbal sparkle up top—all of which the Denon fully displayed, even on the vomitingAmpeg sound of Keith Richards’ stabbing riffs. (I’m getting a little old for such SPL escapades; these are the sacrifices I make for science.)
The Denon did duty for a number of movies during its tenure, in both casual-viewing and reviewer modes, and at no point did it disappoint. First, I flipped across a cable stream of the modern-classic Western Open Range. (Has anybody ever done crusty cowboy better than Robert Duvall?) Through my system, the Copland-esque score soared with impressive openness and depth, while the fusillades of the climactic battle slammed with startling dynamic impact—despite the fact that the movie’s FX handguns sound more like cannons than pistols.
For a taste of Atmos-pherics, I loaded up Dolby’s demo Blu-ray and enjoyed its collection of clever, swooping trailers and soundmarks. I’m on record as strongly preferring at least a 5.1.4-channel Atmos configuration (with both front and rear elevation speakers), rather than just a single front pair of Atmos drivers (what I’ve dismissed in the past as Atmos-lite). The latter is all that the Denon, like most competing receivers, can offer, because of its seven-amp-channels and internalprocessing limits. But I’m coming around to 5.1.2. Especially with dipole surrounds on the sides, which I (apparently, alone) still favor, the difference between these two applications seems surprisingly modest, at least without the illumination of direct comparison. In any case, the front-elevation speakers added a valuable sense of size and height to both ambience and wide-range music, while more vertical effects—such as rain, helicopters, and birds—gained substantially in realism, even when overflying from front to back.
I also spent some time viewing The Lost City of Z via an Amazon 4K stream. Since my Vizio TV won’t display its Info screen while streaming to the set, nor will the Denon show its equivalent while digesting ARC-sourced signals, I couldn’t confirm whether this carried the Atmos metadata or not, but I doubt it. Still, whatever mode the Denon auto-selected (most likely Dolby Digital + Dolby Surround), it steered sound elements to the elevations, with the result that the jungle susurrations gained in eeriness and pervasiveness. Not that this production, which is overly mystical-ized for my taste, needed much of either. (Still, I wonder: What accent exactly is Charlie Hunnam projecting here? The actor is a Geordie, by way of Oz, while his character, Percy Fawcett, is
an upper-crust Devonian. Yet his dialogue sounds as much like an Estonian tinge as anything British I could identify.) But to return to my central topic—did I have one? Oh, yeah: The receiver performed admirably throughout, with no sign of clipping or brightening, at the enthusiastic levels I employ. So unless you have quite a large home theater (mine’s about 3,300 cubic feet) or quite low-sensitivity speakers, you should have no worries when it comes to oomph.
Virtual Heights
And then, there’s the notable and newsworthy inclusion of DTS:X Virtual (unmentioned on the data sheet or the instruction manual, except in those tables in the appendices listing surround mode options). This mode, available to all DTS bitstreams and to most other non-Dolby signal types—is a DSP-processing option that aims to conjure up virtual height and surround speakers from a frontsonly system; it’s scalable, so it can virtualize heights only, or surroundbacks only, or whatever you need. This magic it performed with no small success, most effectively from multichannel programs, and was by far the most impressive with DTS:Xencoded soundtracks.
The potential usefulness of this feature seemed obvious: Those aching for immersive audio but reticent to add the required height speakers might just get some semblance of it with virtual overheads. So I tried adding virtual-frontheights to a 5.1 layout—and was happy to discover a decided new verticality. After first setting my Oppo BDP-105D to output multichannel LPCM (to get around the “no-Dolby” proscription), I played the Dolby Atmos demo Blu-ray. Clips like the “Amaze” and “Unfold” trailers delivered added height to discrete, over-flying effects, like the bird-flaps in the former and chattering in the latter, but even better was the heightened “dome” of ambience in the rain and thunder of the first. (A somewhat flattened dome, to be sure, but a clear improvement nonetheless. There was also a very slight brightening of effects, but not enough to trouble me.) Though comparisons were more difficult, I heard the same from selections from my limited stash of DTS:X Blu-ray Discs.
But the most dramatic demo came when I reconfigured my system to 2.1 channels and played the oddball thrill-ride DTS:X movie American Ultra. I was quickly wowed by the breadth, height, and depth of the sonic dimension projected. No, the surround bubble did not extend very far behind my shoulders, and discrete rear effects sounded vaguely “upand-back-ish” rather than truly rearward. But the height dimension, the virtual-center channel solidity, and the openness and detail of the front-half surround ambience were all highly impressive, including the hovering helicopter at the end of chapter 6, which was strikingly overhead. These effects were still present, though somewhat less powerfully, on other multichannel programs. Though, as alluded to above, due to legal restraints, Virtual X will not be available to any Dolby Digital–encoded bitstream regardless of channel count. In a permanent setup, one could opt to set one or more sources’ outputs from DD bitstreams to PCM, where possible, to make Virtual X available to Dolby Digital–encoded sources.
With the advantages of operating upon a “real” speaker system rather than a soundbar or middling HTIB system, and of processing true DTS:X content, Virtual X really did bring my twospeaker system closer to subjective surround-ness than any other such DSP
algorithm I’ve yet encountered. Of course, these caveats are restrictive: The effects, though still quite good, were less notable from non-X program and rather less so again from typical two-channel broadcast/ cable streams. And, as with all other DSP-surround magi I’ve tried, it’s really a table-for-one proposition: Move out of the sweet spot—this proved to be slightly forward of my calibrated listening position in my studio—or even turn your head much beyond 45 degrees or so, and most of its virtues collapse, at least to some extent.
DTS:X Virtual is distinct from the AVR-X3400H’s native Virtual surround mode, which appears on the pop-up Movie and Music mode menus for all non-DTS signal types. I found plain Virtual decidedly less effective than Virtual X in most cases; both are available to non-Dolby signals. There’s also DTS Neural:X, which maps content, whether two-channel or mulitchannel, to all available speakers, much as “new-era” Dolby Surround (as distinguished from the original, 4.1-channel analog surround, also named Dolby Surround) has done since the advent of Atmos.
Think consumers might be confused? Nah…why would they be?
Extras & Ergos
The menu of extra stuff for the AVR-X3400H is comfortably modest but includes most everything that many desire. Onboard multiroom capabilities are confined to a single Zone 2, which may be powered at speaker level if you don’t deploy front-elevation or surround-back speakers, or which can be digital audio/video via the second HDMI output. Of course, the receiver also hosts Denon’s HEOS wireless multiroom ecosystem, which effectively integrates many-zoned audio via a variety of extra-cost powered speaker and adapter add-ons—but since this family has appeared in these pages several times, we’ll pass over it here.
Denon supplies a dedicated remote that’s simple, plastic, and un-illuminated, but its generous spacing and clearer-than-most labeling highlight the virtues of resisting the multicomponent, full-system-remote temptation. I tried the company’s iOS control app 2016 AVR Remote (hey, Denon, it’s already 2018!) on my iPhone 6. This proved serviceable, and though it provides no new capabilities or notable ergonomic innovations, it makes for another worthwhile option.
I have already touched upon the receiver’s audio streaming options, but note that all except generic internet radio (TuneIn) must be cast from a phone or tablet via the HEOS app; I did not try these. However, the onboard DLNA/UPnP client for harvesting media from a home computer, server, networked drive, or suchlike proved among the faster receiver examples I’ve used, and completely stable, though lacking the search and page-scrolling options
I’ve found on a few others. That said, the Denon played all my stereo files—including DSD, FLAC, and ALAC—without a glitch, and it sounded uniformly pure in doing so. AirPlay and Bluetooth worked as expected, though the latter is not via the higher-quality aptX codec.
As spec’d, the receiver both passed-through UHD video and scaled regular (1080) HD to 4K when so configured. I compared its scaling with that performed by my Oppo BDP-105 universal disc player, and I concluded that the Oppo’s was maybe just barely perceptibly sharper/ quieter/cleaner—something. But the difference (if it existed at all) was so small that it scarcely merited reporting.
Denon’s latest receiver strikes me as a mature and well-refined design. It includes most of the A/V baubles you might expect but isn’t cluttered with a lot of extras to get in your way. Its seven-channel configuration provides more than enough speaker outputs to fire up a basic 5.1 surround system and, for those who seek more, to add a solid dimension of height (or rear, at your discretion) ambience. If all of your speakers are confined to the front of the room, it even provides virtual surround processing for a
3.1.2 simulation of the full objectoriented surround experience. More important, it performs basic tasks, both audio and video, with a sense of quality and eminent usability. I have no hesitation in recommending it to any mid-market shoppers.