Denon AVR-2807 AV Surround Receiver
Flaws substantially outnumber the good aspects
This review will tell you about some of the unflattering features of the Denon receiver that caused me to take it back to where I bought it.  If you don't want to hear negative commentary on this product, then please do not read this review, and out of respect for other people who might want to know about the inferior aspects of this product, please refrain from voting this review.    I will attempt to describe in useful detail some of the usability issues that I discovered, so that you can draw your own conclusions as to whether they matter.  I'll start with the dual-stage behavior of the volume control.  In lieu of a servomotor-driven volume control, the volume setting seems to be implemented within the digital signal processing.  The volume knob is a rotary electronic switch that provides discrete interrupts to a processor at positions corresponding to the detents that you feel.  If the knob is turned slowly, with each detent, the volume changes in discrete steps of 1/2 dB, for a gain or reduction of 12 dB per each full rotation.  If you turn it faster, the effect is accelerated, which means that you have to turn it quickly in order to get an appreciable change in the volume, and it effectively stops when you cease turning it quickly enough.  The need to turn the knob quickly was exacerbated by fine, closely spaced grooves running around the cylindrical surface of the knob, which made it feel slippery in my grip.  On the remote control, if you press and immediately release the volume button, the volume changes by 1/2 dB, but if you press it and hold it down, there is first a short delay that is necessary in order for the press-and-release behavior to be possible, and after that delay, the volume changes at the quicker rate.  For small changes in volume made using the press-and-hold technique, the delay makes up a significant portion of the overall time that you hold down the button, which made it difficult for me to make precise changes in volume using the press-and-hold technique.  The only technique that worked for me was to use a succession of press-and-release actions, and I even found it necessary to insert a brief pause of my own between each successive press-and-release action.    The volume setting is numerically displayed on the front panel, but the knob itself is incapable of revealing the volume setting, owing to the fact that there is no fixed correlation between the position of the knob and the volume setting.  From my seated position across the room and with the receiver slightly higher than eye level, the numerical display wasn't legible, because the lower opaque part of the face panel, where all the proprietary technology logos are displayed, covered up the lower part of the display where the changing volume level is shown.  Note that when component video or HDMI is used as the video source, volume changes can't be displayed on the TV screen.    A couple of decades ago, the norm was for a rotary switch to be used for input source selection.  Invariably, the knob had a mark on it, and the position for each source was clearly marked on the panel.  Denon isn't the only manufacturer using a rotary electronic switch for function selection, but even within those who do, some do it better than others.  On some receivers that are made by another Japanese manufacturer, the display shows the names of the various sources in a long row across the front panel display, giving you a visual indication of how far you have to turn the knob to select the source that you want.  The Denon receiver simply displays the name of the source currently selected.  I also don't understand why they don't give you the ability to remove an unused input from the list that you scroll through when you turn the function knob.    The automated setup performs a variety of capabilities.  One highly useful capability is that it assesses the frequency range capability of each speaker, deciding which speakers should be treated as full-range speakersand which should have high-pass filtering applied.  This capability is impressive, but the configuration menus did not seem orderly arranged to me, and even though the underlying implementation seemed correct, there were obvious errors in both the user interface and the manual.  To explain these errors, I'll describe the capability, and I'll point out the errors when I get to them.  If you do not use a subwoofer, the main right and left speakers will always be treated as \\"Large\\" speakers, and not be subjected to high-pass filtering.  If subwoofer is set to \\"Yes\\", an additional subwoofer mode setting is enabled, which controls how the subwoofer output signal is derived.  If you select \\"LFE+Main\\", the bass from the main channels is added to the subwoofer even though that bass is not filtered out of the main speakers when they are set to \\"Large\\".  The instructions for setting the crossover frequencies state that if the main speakers are set to \\"Large\\", the crossover frequency for them cannot be set or adjusted unless the subwoofer mode is set to \\"LFE+Main\\".  That is the appropriate behavior for the case when subwoofer is set to \\"Yes\\", but the crossover frequency assigned to the main speakers is meaningless if subwoofer is set to \\"No\\", and as such, the capability to adjust that crossover frequency for the main speakers should have been disabled in the on-screen menu.  It is confusing to allow you to make an adjustment that has no effect, and because of other issues with the automatic equalization, this caused me to wonder if high-pass filtering was being applied to the main speakers even though subwoofer was set to \\"No\\".  \\"LFE+Main\\" was evidently the default setting for the subwoofer mode, and in order to change it in the effort to disable the inconsistent crossover setting, it was necessary to first set subwoofer to \\"Yes\\", then change the mode setting from \\"LFE+Main\\" to \\"LFE\\", and then set subwoofer back to \\"No\\".    The manual states: \\"The crossover frequency mode is valid only when subwoofer is set to `ON' and when one or more speakers are set to `Small'\\".  This is clearly incorrect, i.e., if subwoofer is set to \\"No\\", the main speakers will be set to \\"Large\\", and the crossover frequency setting for the surround speakers that are set to \\"Small\\" is meaningful.  Even more confusing is the fact that there is a crossover frequency setting enabled for the LFE channel even though the crossover frequencies for all the other channels are set independently.  This setting is separate from the one that allows you to apply a common crossover frequency to all speakers for which a crossover frequency is meaningful, which is useful in the case of a sub/sat system where all the speakers except for the subwoofer are identical.  The manual says nothing at all about the separate and mysterious LFE crossover frequency.    The change in sound quality that I was able to discern using the Audyssey automatic equalization was similar to turning up the treble and turning down the bass.  My vintage sealed-cabinet speakers have useful extension down to 25 Hz, and because of the gradual, smooth slope to the roll-off, the bass response can be made reasonably flat down to 30 Hz with just a smidgen of help from a conventional tone control.  The closest thing to conventional tone controls is the bass and treble controls that are implemented digitally in the surround modes processor, which is by-passed when the multi-channel analog inputs are selected, which means that the tone controls aren't available if you listen to SACD.  Tone controls have a natural affinity with the speakers and the room, but not with the selected surround modes or the selected input.  According to the on-screen display and the manual, these controls give you +/- 6 dB of control, but there was no mention of the frequency at which that amount of change occurs.  Subjectively, I would judge the maximum effect of the AVR-2807's bass and treble controls at less than half of the effect of conventional tone controls, and inadequate to compensate for the overt effects of Audyssey room equalization.    The on-screen graphical depictions of the equalization settings shows the compensation at 63 Hz, 125 Hz, and doubling until reaching 16 kHz, for nine bands in total.  When you perform the equalization manually, you can choose to begin by copying the automatic compensation settings.  I did that and then tried increasing the compensation at 63 Hz, but the only way that I was able to produce an increase in bass in the lowest octave was by reducing the level uniformly for each of the nine available bands.  That corrected the missing bass in the lowest octave, but it lowered the volume level of the main speakers relative to the other speakers, so I had to go into the speaker setup menu and increase the level for the main speakers, which messed up the speaker level balance for the \\"Audyssey\\" and \\"Flat\\" modes.  It still didn't sound as good as with the equalization turned off, so I moderated all of the settings and turned the higher frequencies down a little.  After a few hours of casual listening, I turned off the equalization, and to my ear, the quality of the sound improved slightly.  I could probably have improved it further with some more effort, but at that point, it was becoming clear to me that I was jumping through too many hoops to achieve something that, in the end, would not be significantly different from what could be achieved more easily with simple tone controls.  I found myself questioning the theoretical assumption that it is desirable to use equalization to compensate for room anomalies, particularly for frequencies approximately higher than 100 Hz, given that this is accomplished at the expense of a flat direct response.