The popular Hi-Fi brand has successfully returned to the AV market with the AVRX2200W. It has already won the What Hi-Fi? 2015 product of the year award and rivals some of the flagship models in the Dolby Atmos home cinema sound category…
We like Denon here in the Richer Sounds Weybridge store. They have made one of the most popular mini systems in the DM39/40, which has been an exceptional seller and made notable by its great reviews wherever it goes.
Denon have been working hard, much like Pioneer and Onkyo, to facilitate the growing market for Dolby Atmos home cinema systems, as well as the new DTS standard DTS-X.
Boasting an impressive 95 watts per channel at 8 ohms you’d be hard-up to find a set of home speakers that the AVRX2200W home cinema amplifier can’t drive – making it a perfect match for some good quality floorstanders if you want to really up the ante with big-screen sound. There’s capacity for up to 7 surround speakers and not one, but two subwoofers for even more thunderous bass so positioning issues are no more.
Equipped to decode and play both Dolby Atmos and DTS-X, it’ll treat sounds with the care required to produce incredibly accurate audio that’ll wrap around you from all angles, rather than being confined to the usual left to right sweep. Bear in mind that you’ll need specific speakers to run Dolby Atmos but DTS-X will work with traditional speaker setups and will become available later this year via a software update.
The AVRX2200W offers a huge range of both port connections and wireless options.
Take a look at the back of the AVRX2200W and it’s clear to see that connectivity is abundant with a good level of future-proofing to. HDMI ports are 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 compatible for true 4K Ultra HD viewing, with the ability to upscale an image to 4k if being used with a similar resolution TV, monitor or projector. There are 8 HDMI inputs to utilise as well as 2 outputs to go to more than one HDMI driven screen, plus all the standard inputs for stereo as well such as 4 phono inputs and 2 optical ports for digital sources.
A neat touch for us was discovering that the amp will wirelessly integrate into a HEOS system (Denon’s wireless multi-room Hi-Fi system), and you can easily run it using the HEOS App. Anything that makes our lives this easy has got to be a huge plus-point right?
So enough about how it looks and how it works, what does it actually sound like? Well, the truth is, I think it sounds rather impressive. We hooked it up to our Atmos surround system from Pioneer (apart from the Rel T7 sub) and tried a little bit of Atmos magic in the form of the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ movie.
To say this amp has depth is quite the understatement, I had to even turn the EQ down on the sub due to it having a bit too much presence over the other speakers but after a very small amount of fine tuning we had it purring wonderfully. The speech was clear, the sounds were pinging off the ceiling and down onto us to give a truly immersive experience, with a great level of clarity while allowing the action to roll all around us.
Musically we switched to our Tannoy XT6F’s and the pair worked harmoniously together to create such a wonderfully vast soundstage in our demo room, we only properly appreciated it stood as far back as we could go. Seeing as both Airplay and Bluetooth are available, it won’t matter whether you use an Apple device or any other system – but with APT-X enabled Bluetooth, you can stream High-Resolution Audio.
Considering this will fall into the same category (sub £500) as the Pioneer VSX930 and the STRDN1060 from Sony, there really is going to be a close fight on for this year’s top awards. But with it’s fantastic connectivity, easy calibration and clean sound, it’s hard to hear past the AVRX2200W.
To buy online or to find out more click here.
Author: Andrew, Weybridge store
