Moving up from HK AVR247 to Denon??

I currently have the Harman Kardon AVR247 in my setup. Inputs to it are (2) DirecTV HDDVRs via component Video/Digital Audio, Apple TV via HDMI and a Sony BluRay via HDMI. I want to have all of it via HDMI and add my HDDVD player back into the mix.

I've been looking fondly at some of the newer HKs, but have been reading the xx13 Denon thread 'til my eyes are bleeding and am thinking maybe a Denon 1913 or 2113ci should be on the list.

Here's some things important to me, some comments and suggestions are very welcome.

1. Sound quality - I'm very enamored of the 'warmth' of HKs sound quality, how is the Denon going to stack up in comparison?

2. Video upscaling - this is very important and is at the top of the list. There are some channels still in SD that have programs that are very good. Watching them from my 54" panny plasma is not very good straight from the HDDVR to the TV nor as a pass through signal via the HK. I can get acceptable, but not great, viewing by setting the HDDVR to 720p and then massaging the video in the HK before sending it to the TV.

How is the Denon video massaging? Better or worse than the HK?

3. Speaker arrangement currently is 7.1. I have Cerwin-Vega satellites and a 12" Velodyne subwoofer that I will be keeping. But I've been reading up on changing that to add 'height' speakers instead of the classic 7.1 setup. Since there is literally very little that is done in 7.1, it seems like a reasonable consideration. But I have no feel for how that sounds in practice. Comments about that would help.

I have no way of listening to a Denon as the local Best Buy is very open and testing SQ is nearly impossible in the store.

Thanks.

Lloyd

Since my questions went unanswered, I did some more research and reading. I'm now officially tired of all of it!!

After reading about the various makes models, and some of the other comparisons of them to the HK line, it all came down to if I want to keep the superior SQ of the HK AVRs, then I need to quit looking at all these others. In none of the various 'compare this model something to this HK model' was it suggested that SQ would be better. That's a big thing to me.

Since getting more power isn't an issue, and the video issues I was wanting to improve don't seem to be that much of an improvement, I've come to the conclusion that not changing the gear was the right move.

So I added the HDMI switch to the rack, now everything is coming in via HDMI. The satellite DVRs are set to 'native on', 720p/1080i/p. So the SD signals from those stations that are not in HD are sent from the sat rx to the AVR @720p, massaged a bit and sent out as 720p to the TV. Oddly just changing these from component video to HDMI improved this, I'm not sure I understand why.

This conversion is quite good. The picture, while not being an HD source, is very good. The main thrust of an upgrade was to take SD to 1080p, but I'm not sure that would be better than the current 720p I'm seeing now.

So I'll save myself a few hundred bucks.

Of course, I could consider that little Darbee Darblet...