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For the launch of Denon's new X3900H and X2900H AV receivers, I visited the company's headquarters in Japan to give the new models a try in the custom listening room developed for the company's Sound Masters to tune products to perfection — but I also visited Denon and Marantz's combined factory, where the two companies produce their hi-fi and AVR components.
This is in the city of Shirakawa, about an hour's ride on the Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo, where the cherry blossoms still lingered even though Tokyo's parks had largely lost their annual spring decoration.
Seeing the production lines and testing for the various hi-fi models was interesting, but I've visited lots of AV manufacturing facilities in my time, and once you've seen four, you've largely seen them all.
But our tour included an extended session in the factory's home theater listening room, which is one of the most impressive setups I've experienced. The room was first established in 1983, so that the first Marantz AV receiver could be developed and tested in it before its launch in 1985.
There are subtle signs of the room's age — the vault-like door has a distinctly '70s infrastructure look and feel to it — but the Marantz receiver at the center of our demo today is unquestionably modern.
The AVC A1H is the company's first model that can handle 9.4.6 speaker channels, with support for basically any spatial audio system you'd care to throw at it.
And 9.4.6 channels is exactly what the room's speaker system offers, in the imposing form of eight Bowers & Wilkins 801 D4 speakers with an HTM81 D4 center, plus four ASW Series subwoofers tucked away at the edges — and six speakers mounted in the ceiling. That's about $250k of speakers.
These were paired with a Sony VPL-VW535 4K projector for the visuals, powered by an Oppo UDP-205 4K Blu-ray player. Alas, it's a reminder that this model has arguably never been bettered despite being discontinued the better part of a decade ago.
I slid into the sweet spot seats in the middle, which Denon and Marantz engineers said is 12 feet from the center channel, and 10 feet from the two rears — not quite following the equilateral distance guidelines laid out by Dolby for Atmos, but I'm not going to quibble with the people who design the actual setup.
The first demo scene was A Star is Born (2018), when Ally comes out to play on stage at Jackson's concert for the first time. The first thing that struck me was the complete disconnection of the sound from the equipment, in the best way.
The sound is so expansive and expressive that it feels like there's no channel system at all — the platonic ideal of Dolby Atmos' spatial audio.
The sound is so amazingly cohesive from top to bottom, and always has a new gear to find when it needs to step up the resonant bass of an acoustic instrument, or when Gaga’s voice is given extra elevation out of the mix by the soundtrack, or to highlight each guitar string suddenly twanging — and whenever it needs to the extra step, it always feels like a seamless flow.
The system feels like it just has endless power, and yet it feels like it's not exerting itself hard at all — there's no sense of the forceful and forward sound that you're likely to get from soundbars or compact options. It's just naturally explosive.
Next up was the opening scene of Unbroken, which puts you in the middle of an aerial battle in World War II — in particular, locking you in and around the experience of one bomber.
There's excellent specificity in the position and scale of effects, such as propellers vibrating the air, or whirring gunner seats and small rattling brackets and fixtures. But these don't sound like they’re being especially highlighted and punched up; they’re just naturally specific in the mix.
Anti-aircraft fire and explosions are grippingly dynamic, popping out of nowhere and rattling the soundscape forward to back as the cockpit is peppered with shrapnel — it's not one crackly effect, but a clear wave of super-fast movement in 3D.
Machine guns fire audibly just above the screen, and cartridges rattle in a clear downward motion as they fall into our 'seating' area — you're able to understand more about the structure of the vehicle from the sound design, when everything is this precise.
Next on the list is Gravity, which the Denon and Marantz team described as their choice of movie for an “AVR stress test” — the scene where Ryan Stone re-enters the atmosphere really slams all channels at once, including bass, continuously for several minutes — they said it's basically the hardest-to-drive movie scene.
With that in mind, what jumped out to me is how, despite the cacophonous rumbling and rattling filling the space around me, I could also hear that the system was really delicately handling the singing in the score. It's soft and refined, and also brutal and bruising, all in the same moment.
The positional effects in this scene absolutely whip around you, alarms pierce with their own individual level of urgency, and exploding debris is somehow chaotically noisy and yet also moves precisely in the sound field.
It’s audio havoc, but it never clips or crushes the disparate elements, so you’re completely trapped in the tensest part of the movie while it happens — this is unimpeachable immersion.
To give us a gentle recovery, we finish up with A Complete Unknown. When Dylan and Joan Baez play their privately contentious set together at the folk festival, there's such a lovely recreation of the ambient sound, ironically perfectly recreating the audio signature of an imprecise speaker system.
The song showcases lovely, sharp guitar string plucks and total rhythmic control in the gentle track. The system can explode the crowd noise in the back, while maintaining the same gentle and faintly distorted vocals at the front, all in careful balance, without the denser sound overpowering anything more delicate.
My demo run in this listening room was the kind of experience that spoils you for lesser home theater setups, though I'll be saved from myself by not having the disposable income to spend a quarter of a million on speakers, before I even get to the supporting equipment — let alone building a suitably impressive room to house it all in.
But if you should find yourself coming into a large inheritance and you love movies, I can think of far worse ways to spend it.
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