My experience with AV receivers is limited to the two that I’ve owned myself.
The first of which was an Onkyo HT-R380 that I used from about 2011 to 2023. I think I paid about £350 for it refurbished, and it came with a 5.1 speaker package. Looking back, this was a very good deal, and it proved to be very reliable unit, working without issues for 12 years. It was still going strong when I sold it but I had decided to upgrade. In hindsight, I partially regret parting with it while it still worked.
I upgraded from the Onkyo to a Denon AVC-X4700H. I won’t go into detail on the differences between the two units—released 10 years later at 3x the price, it was an upgrade on almost every front. Also refurbished, I bought in 2023 for £919 (this time without speakers included).
For 2 years it worked fairly reliably. Spotify Connect would usually be the most buggy feature—often randomly skipping tracks—but that seemed to get fixed with a firmware update at some point. 🤷
In early 2025, the unit developed a fault. I had an Apple TV connected via HDMI, and the unit started freezing when the Apple TV was turned on. Something about the HDMI handshake process was causing the X4700 to completely lock up: no audio or video output, the remote control would stop working, the buttons would stop working, including the power button. The only way to get it out of this state would be to unplug from the mains. It would then work fine but the issue would happen again. It would freeze about 1 in 4 times the Apple TV was turned on.
The intermittency of the problem was confusing, making it hard to reproduce but very frustrating nonetheless. Interestingly, the problem appeared to go away if I reset the firmware to the factory default. And it would come back again when I let it update to the newest firmware. It really leads me to believe that this is a firmware issue, but Denon customer support was not particularly helpful and told me to take it up with the retailer (Richer Sounds) instead. They, of course, cannot do much about a firmware issue.
It was still under warranty, so I sent it back for repair. After six weeks of sitting in a repair centre, I was told it can’t be repaired. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen quite a few people online describing similar experiences, i.e. their faulty receiver is unable to be repaired and they’re given a refund instead. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many other people describe my particular freezing issue, so I think it’s a bit of a lost cause.
So, in mid-2025, I am tasked with choosing a replacement AV receiver.
<aside> 👎
Tl;dr I got a Denon X4800H instead and it has exactly the same bug
</aside>
In a model name like AVR-X4800H:
| AVR | Product type, i.e. AV Receiver. Sometimes AVC which is the same product but without the FM/AM radio tuner. |
|---|---|
| X | Series (S for entry-level, X for mid-to-high) |
| 4XXX | Place in series (1 = budget model up to 8 = high-end model) |
| X800 | Iteration (800 = newest release) |
| H | H for HEOS, BT for Bluetooth |
There are some exceptions, particularly with the higher-end models, but I’d recommend most people stick to the “X” range.