The "Official" Denon AVR-3808CI Thread - Page 10

Plus I don't think he necessarily wants to play 7.1 & a biamped pair simultaneously, which would require 11 amps; he just wants to have the speakers connected so he could switch between one setup and another.

I think Onkyo lets you do this with their amplifier config options but not sure Denon does. I'd like to be able to switch between a 5.1 with fronts biamp'ed setup and a separate pair of (B) stereo speakers in another room and I don't think I can do it with the Denon (either 3808 or 4308). Someone correct me if I'm wrong for what I want

Thanks for the heads up on your 3808 being in the warehouse, if I had waited to hear from my salesguy, I would still be waiting, he is out on vacation. I called after I saw your previous note, I figured yours and mine were at the same warehouse, I got mine from the Tukwila Southcenter MAV.

OK fellas. I jumped off the fence that I was teetering on between the 875 and the 3808, and decided that I would rather have the 3808 with the internet/networking capabilities than the REON VP chip, with the reasoning being that the DCDi chip shouldn't be THAT much worse to make me want to trade away the internet/netowrking features of the 3808. I am having my new speakers installed on 8/13, which is when the receiver will be hooked up as well. After I get everything set up and working I'll definitely post about the DCDI chip's handling of both SD tv and sd dvd content.....unless someone else does first of course.

Ryan

Reons? Reons? We don't need no steenking Reons!

I knew that someone would say something like that. I'm actually thinking now that Denon and Faroudja may have worked something out to fix the macroblocking problem that the DCDi chips are notorius for. Like everyone says, it's not just the hardware chip, it's the software implementation of that chip that also has a lot to do with performance. My hunch is that the DCDi implementation that Denon has used in the 3808 will fare quite well in the HQV deinterlacing tests, even if it isn't QUITE up to snuff with the Reon. i can certainly live with that in exchange for free internet radio, networking capabilities and firmware upgrades on the fly! As an FYI, this will be my frist Denon receiver, as I have used an Onkyo 898 for the past 6 years, which was awesome in and of itself. I wil be pairing the new 3808 with a full set of Polk in-wall/in-ceiling speakers (3 tc265i, 2 sc80i, 2 tc65i and a psw505!). Wish me luck!


Ryan

Sorry, trying to get this through my pea brain. If you output 480 out of the STB and have the HDMI Resolution set to 720P/1080i, shouldn't the 3808 scale the resolution up? If so, then the Full vs Normal setting is described only to affect 480p/576p and would therefore be ignored?????

Bottom line, I want to make sure the the 3808 does not stretch the picture as reported on the 875 which to me defeats part of the purpose of having the Reon chip. Comments?

I love the quality of Denon's receivers, but I have to say that the one thing tempting me away from the 3808 is the Sony 5300ES with its eleven selectable video sources, as opposed to only seven on the Denons. I have nine devices I want to plug into my receiver, so that Sony is looking better all the time.

However, as nice as the ES receivers are, I'm afraid of sacrificing quality vs. the Denon. Can anyone give me an honest opinion of how the specs of the Sony 5300ES and the Denon 3808 stack up? What am I missing out on with the Denon if I go Sony?

About $100?

Please post the HQV numbers when you get them.... it will be very interesting to see where they come out?

Are you looking at the actual AVR? In the manual on page 5 the layout diagram shows these connections:

Front L
Front R
Center
Surround A L
Surround A R
Surround B L
Surround B R
Surround Back/Amp Assign L
Surround Back/Amp Assign R

Only two of them are labeled "Amp Assign". But can Surround B L/R also be assigned as an alternative stereo output and bi-amped with the two Surround Back/Amp Assign channels?

And in response to Phil Tomaskovic:

I do not want to use all of my speakers at the same time, but to have a set a 5.1 speakers and be able to switch to another set of 2.0 bi-amped.

Yes, but can you turn it off (passthrough) for some inputs, e.g., BD player, but engage it for other sources, e.g., STB or DVD recorder?

Yes, I am looking at the actual AVR, I just finishing making the connections, getting ready to run through the setup. These last two channels are set using the amp assign. (page 33 bottom right - set 7.1 for surround back, or set to bi-amp, zone, 2ch, etc)

If you want 7.1, you need to set them to be surround back, otherwise they can be assigned to a zone, or they can be used to bi-amp the front speakers (page 68)

Surround B is seperate speaker post connections. On page 70 it shows using surround A and surround B and bi-amping the fronts at the same time. I don't see anything that shows surround B bi-amped. Amp assign and surround B are two different things. You can't bi-amp the fronts and use 7.1 at the same time.

Why does it read this on the bottom of page 30?

NOTE:
It is not possible to convert "1080i" signals into "720p" format.
It is not possible to convert "720p" signals into "1080i" format.

I'm using a 720p projector and TV. I wanted to at least try the scalers in the Receiver to see how they compared to the ones in my projector and TV on 1080i material. Am I just misunderstanding something?

Thanks

My "guess" is that this is a limitation of the FL2310 chip from Faroudja......

My projector has Reon. Can someone confirm if the Faroudja chip can be turned off and allow all HDMI sources to pass through?

Page 30 of the manual shows how to select scaling........one option is "OFF".

Just got shipping confirmation today and will have mine on the 8th, I can't wait, I even took leave the rest of the week.!!!!

I connected everything, set amp assign to 7ch, and ran through the auto setup, the distances looked reasonable (sub was a little far). It had all speakers set to small, but had 40hz xover center, 60hz xover fronts, and 80hz crossover for surrounds and rears. The subwoofer is defaulted to LFE only, so I would not have expected these low xover numbers. In the manual setup menu, I set a 80hz xover.
I then continued on through menu options in the order the manual shows them. I got to the firmware update option and ran it. It showed some different things that it seemed to be updating, numbers like 4/14 6/14 8/14 up to 14/14, then the display on the 3808 said Firm Update Latest Firmware. The book said it should say updating, and take quite a while, so maybe it was just checking the 14 various parts and decided it was already up to date. Now it doesn't want to power back on , still says Firm Update Latest Firmware on the display. I guess I will wait a little while longer then power cycle it

i too would like to know if this is possible.

if so, is it possible to power the fronts bi-amped and the zone 2 at the same time.
without powering the center and surround. so basically a bi-amped 2.1 with a zone 2 at the same time?

That is a huge blow to the 720p pj guys. I was looking at the 905 and the 3808 and am glad I went with the 905 after hearing this.

I'm in that boat, but thankfully I'm only running SD DVD's, Blu-ray disks and an X-Box 360--all of which I can have scaled to 720p before the signal ever hits the receiver. Next year--probably November--I'll upgrade to a 1080p projector.

I'm glad I don't have to worry about all the other video sources some people have to. This up-and-down converting mess with all the HDMI receivers this year seems to be confusing. I just want to watch a few movies and play a game or two.

I ordered at J&R earlier today but after seeing this message, I stopped by the same Magnolia and bought one from there. I'll cancel the J&R order.
Haven't set it up yet - will let you all know how it goes.

If others are considering purchasing from this Magnolia (Bellevue, WA), be aware that they do not have many in stock. I dealt with Chuck who was very helpful.

Same - I have a 720P projector and I don't really care about any 'i' content.
I am guessing lot's of folks on this thread primarily use an upscaling DVD player like the Oppo or a PS3/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player. All 720p or 1080p. What little 1080i live OTA HD I watch I am happy to let the projector handle.
Most important to me is the audio quality - and I haven't heard the new Denon or Onkyo yet, but am leaning towards the Denon based on what I have heard from the two companies in the past.

Reading through the forum everyone who has been receiving there 3808's from BB Magnolia or the Magnolia store are from the west coast. If anyone receives there 3808 from an BB Magnolia on the east coast please let us know. I am waiting impatiently for mine in Orlando.

These are the scenarios where a good upscaler would actually benefit you the most. Chances are the upscaler/deinterlacer in your pj is not the greatest. When playing SD DVD's the 360 is doing the upscaling which is definitely not as good as a high quality receiver. When playing Blu Ray discs you are in the same boat. If the player is outputting 1080i/p, it leaves the PJ to downscale the image. By letting a high quality video processor do it instead you will benefit from an improved image. The only people who really don't need a good processor in a receiver are the full 1080p guys (Xa2, ps3, Rs1).

First impressions with my new 3808

Last night I spent some time looking at SD from the cable and a DVD. The HDMI information / Signal information (p45) was showing that the 480i from the cable via hdmi, was being passed through. I then changed "A to H" to "A to H & H to H", now it would scale the 480i to 720p (I have a TH50PX50U Panny). So the first setting had the TV scaling, "H to H" allowed the hdmi input to be scaled in the Faroudja.

I looked at the stills with the music channels, they still looked like crap, but I don't think much can be done with these. I then watched some different SD channels. "The Patriot" was on, when I got to the scene where Mel rode past the front line carrying a flag, I paused and stepped through here. I did not see any significant jaggies on the flag, but a fair amount of noise, and the blurring of people being passed reminded me of the "Film resolution loss" test on the HQV disk, which my HD-A2 fails. Leading and trailing edges were blurred, with coat buttons smeared and doubled. So it appears that the Faroudja does not handle 24 fps material all that well.

I did run the HQV before I swapped out the AVR, I had definite video noise. The video resolution test passed, the jaggie test passed, film resolution test failed, and I could see patterns in the upper stands.

To my un-trained eyes, I can't see any significant difference between the TV scaling 480i to 720p and the Faroudja doing the scaling. SD looks ok for SD - I've never seen SD through a quality VP like DVDO or Realta, so I'm not sure how much can be done with SD. The quality is reasonable, just not enough resolution.

I then put LOTR FOTR in the HD-A2, the HD-A2 does a good job of scaling, the picture is definitely better than it looks in an SD DVD player, like my Denon DVD-1730. Signal information showed 1080i -> 1080i, and the picture looked the same as before I swapped, quite good for SD. I then set the HD-A2 to the other resolutions, 720p, 480p, 480i. The picture seemed a little brighter when being passed through as 1080i, darker when being passed through as 720p or scaled from 480i or 480p to 720p. I suspect this is the HD-A2 doing this. In each case the picture looked similar, almost no jaggies, but smearing with motion. Again, I'm not sure if the smearing was influenced by the video processing. I watched Frodo flip the pages in Bilbo's book at Rivendell, it looked similar no matter which scaling was happening.

I put the HQV disk in and tried the various output resolutions from the HD-A2. The 10080i passthrough looked pretty much the same as before the swap, the results were the same here - noise fail, res loss pass, jaggies pass, film res loss fail, patterns in the stands. 720p passthrough was different - the res loss test constantly strobed, and the film loss test looked the same as the res loss test. The jaggies actually looked a little better. The res loss seems legitimate, I am reducing resolution. When I went to 480p, the results were similar to 720p, except the res loss was worse (expected). 480i had different results - the res loss test actually passed, even though the picture was definitely blurry - no strobing though. Jaggies still looked good, and the film res loss test had similar results as in the 1080i mode, just more blurry. pronounced patterns in the stand seats.

What this all seems to indicate, is that the Faroudja does a good job of deinterlacing, but not good with 3:2 pulldown / inverse telecine.

Next I will check out the HTPC output, more later.

I couldn't agree more. I'm not crazy about leaving the receiver or projector to do the scaling. I prefer my disk player to do that. Right now I've got the X-Box 360 set to 720p output, and I have Denon's DVD-557 upconverting DVD player doing the same. This fall I plan on getting the best Blu-ray player available that will upconvert my DVD's and make them look as good as possible. Then next fall, I'm going all 1080p.

The net function and streaming are a little confusing to setup. The net setup info is displayed incorrectly, but the MAC address is there. You have to try using it before going to radiodenon, it then somehow sends your MAC to them. Then you can put your MAC in as an ID, it will prompt you to create an account. Once this is done, you have access to a LOT of stuff on the internet.

The manual was not clear about setting up streaming from a PC, Media player 11 has an option to turn on sharing, then the PC shows up under net choices.

I tried setting up the Network Connection with a Linksys Wireless G Game Adapter. Am I using the right adaptor? If not, which one? I do not have a wired Network and may have the wrong product. To say the setup is non intuitive is an understatement. Thanks in advance.