Denon's receiver range grows more comprehensive each year and the current line up features no less than seven, from the entry-level AVR-1507 to the uber-specified AVR-4306. The range advancement is logical, adding features and performance for a handful of dimes with each step.
You can almost hear the salesman's patter: 'Well for just £50 extra, sir could also have....' and before you know it Barclaycard owns your soul.
So picking the middle, middle model from a stack of Denon boxes filling my dining room, the AVR-2307 comes to the table for £600. Although launched last year, it packs plenty of cutting-edge features including video conversion to HDMI and like-for-like format processing that will turn 1080i component video into a 1080i HDMI signal.
Denon's affair with Audyssey continues but in this model the room equalisation is done by a standard 8-band parametric EQ system that you can then apply Audyssey curves to. Which I found odd.
Two-in one-out HDMI switching to 1080p is handy for your Blu-ray or HD DVD player, and these connections feature active repeaters. This is more unusual at the price and means you can run cables up to 15m into the AVR-2307 (30m from source to display) without losing the signal. Full auto setup with microphone supplied and two-zone multiroom audio is par for the £600 receiver course.
Under the hood is the usual solid Denon engineering with 100W for seven channels and the option to use channels 6 and 7 for rear-back speakers, active zone 2 or bi-amping the main left and right speakers. Connectivity is good enough. You get a port for an iPod dock, lip sync to 200ms and three individual user preference modes.
On the downside, the onscreen display takes us back to 1995 with block text and Denon's pointy-hand cursor, and there is no USB port or networking ability. Instead you get a phono turntable input, which would be seriously retro if owning a turntable wasn't so damn cool lately.
You also get a new and rather stylish remote control if you can live with having buttons on the front and the back (under a flap) and no backlight (just glo-keys).
