The Amplifier, or should I say the Receiver, is the second important part of your living-room installation, it will basically allow you to expand your system with additional components. In my case, the extensions are on one side to use my old equipment, my LP turntable and my DVD player (even though this one could have been removed since I have alternatives), as well as for the gaming part, I connected my PS3 and my Wii.
My amplifier
The Denon AVR-4308 was a high-end amplifier when I bought it back in 2008, it has now been a bit outdated on some points.
- The connection panel at the back of the device is still perfectly complete for most usage, featuring HDMI, S-Video, RGB component and Composite (RCA) for the video and RCA both stereo and 5.1, Toslink (Optical), SPDIF (RCA) for the sound, but it will lack the latest HDMI 1.4 connections to support 3D signal.
- The network capabilities although present are not fully functionnal, the web-interface to navigate in the library of a DLNA server is for instance quite slow, the DLNA support is also limited to audio.
But I have to say that it still hold pretty well on the overall performance.
My config
Like the PS3, there is not that much to configure on the Denon AVR-4308. The longest part is to configure the different input and set-up each of them. It is indeed possible to choose different options : video upscalling or not, sound output, equalizer… Except this, the basic give pretty satisfying results.
My review
The video upscalling is quite good and fair results, but I got a small issue when using with my DVD player (Philips DVP-7040) and my flat panel TV (Sony KLV-52X300A), I have a serie of white dots in the top left corner when I activate the upscalling on the amplifier. I do not got these dots when the upscalling is done by the TV, but the image quality is not as good as with the amplifier…difficult choice…