Denon once again proved they know how to build a better receiver by staying true to their roots and delivering more than advertised power and performance, unparalleled bass management flexibility and an overall solid, time tested platform. The AVR-2308CI is certainly one of the most versatile receivers I have tested at this price range carrying over many of the great features (independent channel trims per mode, independent crossover settings per speaker group, Audyssey MultEQ, HDMI upconversion with OSD support, etc) that until only recently, were found only on their flagship products. Had it not been for the new line up of Onkyo receivers that recently hit the market offering most of the great features of the AVR-2308CI with the addition of True-HD and DTS-HD decoding for roughly the same price, I’d declare the Denon the absolute winner in this price class. While the Denon does lack some of the Onkyo high definition audio decoding features, it also makes up for it with wider bandwidth component video inputs (100MHz vs 50MHz), analog to HDMI up conversion to 1080p, Audio Restorer featured for compressed music sources, and arguably more solid construction. The bottom line is there are no free lunches but the price per performance ratio of the AVR-2308CI allows the end user to save some significant coin to splurge on a few steak dinners.

I walked away from this installation amazed at the fidelity improvement of my parents system thanks to the Audyssey room correction and solid amplification section. While my parents are as far removed from what one could consider “technically inclined” people, they were nonetheless still quite pleased with the end result and the bragging rights that they had the latest A/V gear which is smart enough to give you that great movie theater sound experience for all the seats in their room.