Purchase a receiver or what? need your advice.


Hello everyone, I will be purchasing a Sony 65" 930E  during this holiday sales season. Along with it I want to pair it up with a power source that with take advantage of the full 4k experience.

I will have a 7.1 speaker configuration consisting of Polk RTi12 fronts, Polk FXi A6 for the surrounds and rear surrounds, Polk CSi6 center, SVS PB 12 NSD subwoofer.

My source will be a Oppo 205 4K Blueray player. 

I have been looking at two AV receivers... Denon 6400H and Marantz 8012. Their specs are pretty similar. I have a Denon receiver that I use at work that must be 15 years old that I have never had a problem with,  so I kind of trust the build quality of their product.  

So should I pick one of those or should I go another way?

Thanks for your input. 
meambler
Yes, it was the latest AV8805 processor.  I have not directly heard the 8802 or 8803, but I suspect that there really isn't that much difference.  The 8802 was already extremely well designed with large main power supply and a lot of localized power supply capacitors all around the DAC I/V board.  And the "new" version of the Marantz HDAM discrete analog boards.
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I was quite impressed with the AV8805, based on a $4k price tag and expecting the Marantz "warm" signature.  The sound was very full and had a lot of impact and authority (audio percussion and sounds hit with a lot of authority).  That being said, I could tell it was warm with rolled-off highs.  If that was my only exposure to HT processors, I could easily live with it.  It did sound very good.
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That being said, my main proc is Krell S1200U and the Krell basically blew away the Marantz in all ways!  Krell was significantly cleaner in both audio AND video.  Of course audio was not warm sounding and was crystal clear.  However, it was surprising how good the video was on the Krell, since it is just re-transmitting the HDMI signal with the audio stripped out.  With the Marantz, I could tell that the video (through HDMI) was not clean and had a lot of noise.  Images were not as crisp and sharp looking. 

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A lot of this could be explained by the Krell using only linear power supplies (even for digital and video sections).  There isn't any switching power supply in the Krell (even the Foundation uses ONLY LINEAR).  That being said, I think the Marantz warmth could be resolved a lot by placing in a Hi-Fi Tuning Supreme or Silverstar fuse.  That would increase the speed/detail and reduce the warmth, and would probably also increase the sharpness and quality of the HDMI video.
@auxinput

Thanks for sharing your experiences with the AV8805. Did you test it for surround movies (home theater)? I don’t like Audyssey in the Marantz and would prefer ARC2 way better IMO. Even the latest NAD av products no longer use Audyssey, they now use Dirac, which is superior to the Audyssey. Room Perfect is another top notch room correction calibration.

In my dedicated home theater room I’m now using the Lyngdorf MP-50 av processor which uses Room Perfect and its RP implementation is extraordinary. With Room Perfect properly calibrated the surround sound experiences from movies takes to a whole new level in comparison to the Classe SSP 800 that I previously had in my dedicated home theater room.
The RP in the Lyngdorf MP-50 makes huge difference for surround sound home theater application.
Not to mention that the SSP 800 cannot support Dolby Atmos, DTS-X & Auro 3D. Now with the Lyngdorf MP-50 my setup is 7.2.4 with 4 overhead height ceiling speakers for Atmos setup. 

On the video side of thing, I run the video from my Oppo 205 directly to my 4K display using video only HDMI out of the Oppo 205 and run the audio to my AV processor using the audio only HDMI out of the Oppo 205. The Oppo 205 is my only AV video source in my dedicated theater room. I did the same when I was still using the Classe SSP 800.

@caphill - hopefully you are still monitoring this thread.  I tested the AV8805 in my system using the beginning part of a movie that had excellent music in the intro and very high quality audio and video.  And yes, it did have excellent surround elements in the beginning of the movie.  We did not do an Audessey calibration - it was completely turned off.

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Regarding a second topic, I have tried room correction and I do not like that at all.  I had the opportunity to do a Dirac room correction in my own theater and I could never get it to sound right.  Dirac is so horrendessly intrusive on changing and tweaking the sound that it creates problems in my opinion.  The Dirac processing did weird things to the phasing of the sound and made all sounds seem like they were in your head (like listening to headphones) instead of way out in front of you like the movie ambience is supposed to be.  I could dial this down, but it never sounded good.  It also tweaked the frequency response and sometimes seemed to make things too smooth - I lost resolution and microdetail in the sound/tones/textures.  Also, if aggressively used in bass, it caused subwoofers to peak and push to much at bass null frequencies.  Sorry, but Dirac is not for me.

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I think I tried YPAO Yamaha auto-correction.  That did not work well either.  In both cases, things just sounded better and more natural with any sort of automatic room correction turned off.  I do a lot of room acoustic treatments and I use careful equipment matching and fuses to control timber and response of the equipment.  That works significantly better than any sort of room correction.
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Actually, at RMAF there was a room that really touted "room correction".  I listened for just a bit, and it sounded nice and balanced, but I could not understand what the big deal was, lol.  Many other rooms sounded nice and balanced.  This "room correction" room actually sounded rather flat and sterile, most likely because it was using an external/outboard room correction device and signal goes through A/D and D/A stages - which lose all the voicing and "singing" of the preamp/processor.