Denon AVR-2312 Review

We never have to steer far from the Denon family when amplifiers and AV receivers are concerned. Though we have tried hard to prove their tagline, ‘The Denon Difference’ wrong, more often than not, we’ve failed. There definitely is a difference when you’re listening to a Denon amplifier and when you’re listening to others. Let’s hope their recently delivered AVR-2312 can keep the tradition in check.

Out of the Box

We’ve seen several AV receivers boast of two knobs for input selection and volume, on either side of their front panel. Denon does it by giving these knobs a size difference based on importance, so the input selector is smaller and the volume is bigger. Even the buttons below the broad and wide LED spanned across the front panel have been sized differently based on importance. This makes the entire understanding process a lot easier for the average user. The couple of ports this receiver flaunts on its front panel have been given their little carved out home at the bottom right, primarily so you don’t damage the ports. The rest of this black, blazing receiver has been kept conventional, including the big knobbed red and black plastic speaker terminals on the back panel.

Quite traditional or conventional rather, in form

Technology

The AVR-2312 is a 7.2 channel receiver, with the ‘.1’ being replaced by ‘.2’, primarily because of the two subwoofer pre-outs being offered on the back panel. This, along with the 105W per channel it offers in seven channel modes, means that this receiver is built to handle mid-sized to large living rooms and home theatres. At the same time it offers a multi-zone/multi-source playback function, which means that you can use this beast to play one source in one room and another source in the other room. To add to it, Denon comes with RemoteApp, which is an application that can be installed on your iPad, iPhone or Pod touch to control the receiver from anywhere, wirelessly.

Has a larger volume knob for easy use

Speaking of Apple, this receiver also offers AirPlay to allow you to stream music wirelessly from your Apple products. You can even choose to connect these media players to your receiver directly via the USB port. But what’s very fascinating is that this receiver comes with a FLAC HD decoder. This means, all you audiophiles out there can now play your uncompressed FLAC recordings from your pen-drive or directly. At the same time, the AVR-2312 also supports MP3, WMA and AAC audio formats.

In his day and age, you can’t have a receiver that wants to be successful without equipping it with 3D functionality. This receiver comes with 3D pass-through that allows your 3D Blu-ray player to recognise your 3D flat panel even when the receiver is in the middle. If it wasn’t for this capability, you couldn’t watch 3D Blu-rays via the receiver, which would mean you would have to settle for audio from your flat panel. The AVR-2312’s GUI overlay offers you the best way to tweak the receiver. You can even use the Audyssey MultEQ XT auto setup feature to set it up initially, although you’ll probably want to do a bunch of tweaking yourself. The front panel offers four assignable buttons that you can assign to your most commonly used sources if the remote is too far and the input selector knob takes too long.

Remote Control

Although the remote is laid out fairly well, it has a knack for hanging. There were several occasions when I had to continuously press a button until I got a response. So there is a significant delay in this remote’s response and if you do have any of those aforementioned Apple products, you should try the RemoteApp application.

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