Denon DRA-800H 2-Channel Stereo Network Receiver for Home Theater, Hi-Fi Amplification, Connects to All Audio Sources, HDCP 2.3 Processing, Compatible with Amazon Alexa

This is my third Denon receiver starting with the AVR2805 back in 2005 (with AL32) and AVR-S900W more recently. Last week I received the DRA-800H Hi-Fi Network receiver from Amazon since this is exactly what I was looking for. A powerful 2-channel receiver amp that can play Pandora and YouTube music videos with 100W + 100W 8 Ohms discrete, high resolution sound. After hookup and listening to various sources I realized that this new receiver has the same powerful sound that Denon is famous for and the sound that I love so dearly. I hooked it up to my 4K AppleTV with HDMI and to TV HDMI (arc). Setup was a breeze and highly intuitive using the Setup Assistant. Used latest 4K HDR HDMI cables 4.4.4, Cat-8 Ethernet from router, as well as bi-amped (A+B) using 12 AWG Silverback speaker cables to my Monitor Audio Silver 6's toed in and with component isolation using Vibrapods. Still the average man's audiophile setup, but probably sounds just as good as a 100K setup. Make sure your TV has HDMI (arc). Can also hookup a pre-amp such as Shiit Magni3 and use this as an amplifier. A really nice feature is the HEOS button on the remote that gives me access to all my online music sources & tuner channels using one button operation. Same for the Quick Select buttons 1-4. Sound quality of Denon DRA-800H is powerful, detailed and sharp with just the right amount of base. I have heard this sound quality in all my Denon receivers and appears to be in their DNA. After all, it’s all about the sound. Watched Carlos Santana live Europa, Diana Krall, Latin / Cuban music, BB King the Thrill has Gone concert, etc. Denon you just made my life very happy! This is EXACTLY what I wanted. A powerful 2.1 channel receiver, albeit very high quality sound with 100 W/channel and be able to hook up to latest music videos using HDMI / AppleTV / YouTube / AirPlay. A clean setup with top notch sound for music listening. I packed my 7.2 Denon Receiver for future use. One minor downside is that the front USB is not compatible with my iPhone direct input. Surprising change, but can be overcome with AirPlay, BT, HEOS, RCA, etc. The Smart Remote function is a bit confusing for my TV (resolved now). Minor issues nevertheless. My next dream Denon receiver would be this unit with AL32 processing or the PMA-1600NE with the features & inputs from this DRA-800H 2-channel. Thank you Denon. This is posted on Denon website as well as Amazon. My photo needs updating. Updated 08-15-2019: After listening to this for another one week, I realize that the sound is getting even better and everything seems to be falling in sync. Smart Remote function works perfectly with my Panasonic TV remote. HEOS button - I use this every day. One push of the HEOS button or the Quick Select remote button takes me directly to my favorite Pandora station and starts playing. Sound quality is excellent as I have mentioned even through the headphone jack when I use my Beyerdynamic DT770 studio headphones. Highly addictive Network Receiver. I will upgrade my setup with Polk Signature S60's in October and replace the old Monitor Audio's as shown in photo. Will update this at that point. Also now using my EarSound ES100 pre-amp via RCA with excellent results. The matching of Denon DRA-800H with Polk Signature S60’s is perfect as recommended by Sound United. Photos attached. Update 06-06-2020. This receiver is now listed as top pick finalist in March 2020 edition of Sound & Vision magazine Top Picks section. Rightly so.

Can't say enough about this unit. I wanted a two-channel setup for our small family room. Every AV Integrated receiver has way too many features for me (i.e. Multiroom, 5.1, 7.2, 9.2, Roon ready, etc.) overkill in my opinion. I just wanted something I could get better sound for movies, sports, and stereo listening. I have the Denon PMA-1600 hooked up to a pair of KEF R-3s in our living room. This amp is in a smaller room connected to some Totem Acoustic Signature 1 speakers and sounds just as good. for TV listening Dialog is clear, music is full-spectrum. There's plenty of bass friends who ask where is the sub-woofer? I tell them I don't use one. The amp has all the features you need, an easy-to-use remote, and even tone controls! I watched "Dune" incredible sound, watched "Peaky Blinders" incredible sound, played my records, CDs, steamed music everything sounds fantastic. Wow! One thing that should be noted on some TVs, ours is a Sony, you have to switch the sound output for the amp to work. I almost sent it back because I could get no sound out of it. Read the manual made the adjustment and now everything works fine. The Manual is online. A cool feature is you can set the volume and when you tune the amp on it automatically starts on that set volume. I have mine set to around 45. So when I turn it on I can hear it. If there's a football game on I can turn it up or down. Also, the amp comes on and responds to my cable remote (Xfinity in my case). Didn't have to do anything it just works. Get yourself a good set of speakers and you are done.

This receiver is a stand in for my ancient Marantz 2270 that is getting repaired. It is in my workshop driving an ancient pair of Cizek 8 ohm two way speakers that have been re-coned and re-crossovered (I had to rebuild the crossovers after blowing them out.) My new crossovers rock! I bought a Yamaha R-S202BL. It would never remember the input selected when it came online. Back it goes. I bought another, even though the bass is nonexistent as the price was $150. This one would turn off at any power level after a few hours. WhataBunchCrap? Two faulty receivers in a row? I have NEVER had a faulty appliance out of the gate at my ancient age. Back it goes, again? This Denon just runs rings around the Yamaha. It has an extraordinary array of features. The distortion figure is ---> under zero point one percent (!) THD at rated power. <--- This is phenomenal performance for hardware in this price range. My Cizeks are capable of full bass on my Marantz 2270, but this unit just can't provide it, as the power supply capacitors are tiny in comparison. You will need a powered subwoofer for serious audio. Look, kiddies. I'm a degreed engineer. It took about an hour before I plugged this sucker in before I got a tweet out of it. It is both flexible and has a powerful feature set, and because of that, complex to set up, and perhaps even complex to use (I won't be using most of its feature set for now - turn it on and stream from my PC.) That and the inability to provide solid bass is why I gave it four stars. It tries to be everthing to everbody. As such, it is complicated to set up. But still, the audio quality rocks and is worth the pain of dealing with the set up. I mean, seriously? 0.08% THD? That is freakin' awesome, dudes.

I Absolutely love this receiver-setup was easy and the unit easily communicates with my smart TV. (Samsung Q6FN) The sound is warm, rich, and detailed. I definitely noticed a sound improvement from my old receiver. The HDMI functionality is the icing on the cake!!!! My ONE and ONLY complaint is that it WILL NOT pass 1440P/120Hz through via HDMI. I connected my Xfinity cable box and my gaming PC to corresponding HDMI inputs and ran one HDMI out to my TV. (All HIGH bandwidth HDMIs-22 Gbps) GPU is 1080Ti, anyway long story short I could never select 1440P/120Hz as a resolution despite restarting, updating, deleting devices in Windows and restarting etc etc. I could select 1080P/120Hz, 4k60/4k30/1440P60 and various other resolutions, but NOT 2560 x1440 120Hz which the Q6FN does. (soon as I connected directly to TV BAIM! there it was) Again, this is my only complaint and might be fixed down the road with an update. I just ran the 1080Ti's HDMI to the Samsung directly, and in a way this is better because I can have separate TV calibration settings for my PC input and Xfinity input. The ARC functionality works great and allowed for the whole system to work with all HDMI and therefore less cable clutter. Overall, I'm quite pleased and HIGHLY recommend this.

All I needed for my apartment was a 2 channel system. None of the systems put out much bass these days, and I have old Polk Audio speakers with their own passive subs. The trebble/bass aren't that good, IMHO. I wound up buying an amplified subwoofers to go with it. I really like the remote app upthat you can download to you pr phone or tablet. I really like it on the tablet. I also like that you can control the subwoofer output when hooked up. You can easily navigate FM stereo presets-if you still listen to FM radio like me, and there is also a companion app called HEOS which is for internet radio (if you subscribe to any) that also makes it easy to surf the various internet radio stations. I also like that I can hook up phono (records/ vinyl). The remote apps are cool. But then I am converting from a 30 year old system that just quit.

I currently have a fairly old (non-smart) Samsung TV to which I recently added a Roku Stick +. I wasn't at all sure that the audio from the TV would be sent through the AVR as it is definitely not ARC compliant (doesn't even have analog audio outputs). It does work and I assume it does because of the Roku. All the networking aspects work great! Special note (heads up) regarding something I haven't seen in any of the reviews - I have Apple iTunes on my laptop with a fairly extensive library of music. The iTunes has an AirPlay button at the top of the app that you can specify the "Living Room" on my setup that is my designation for my wifi router/modem. It works really well with the data speeds my service has (aprx 200Mbps). I hooked up a regular Blu-Ray player - movies and cd's both play and sound great. I have a new pair of Wharfedale Diamond 225's that are breaking in very well. They are an excellent match up with this Denon AVR - great tone and plenty of SPL.

This dang thing just works. Set it up and it works. That's it. Enjoy. I'm really good at making myself feel guilty about buying luxury items for myself. This $600 amp, by my standards, is expensive. I could have bought a $200 yamaha or whatever and used bluetooth is what I tell myself. However, I don't regret this purchase and that's all you should need to know to make your decision. But if you want more info read on. The amp is high quality from my experience, but I am inexperienced in the home audio world. This is the first amp/speaker combo I've owned that I didn't DIY, so I don't have a lot of perspective here. I can't speak to how this amp sounds vs another amp, sorry. But I can speak about the integrations and features: I have it hooked up to my TV, Spotify Connect, and Bluetooth. Turn on the TV and the amp turns on. Choose this amp as the output for spotify on any of my devices and the amp comes to life and starts playing music. For anything that's not on Spotify I can use BT and it automatically switches. I could even make a music server and play high-res stuff that way. The little integration features make this amp a pleasure to own. I was concerned about how well the features would work and was weighing this amp vs like a rasp pi with mopify/mopidy installed running to a DSP that would feed two amps to bi-amp some speakers. Option A is this amp. Buy it, set it up, and enjoy. Option B was the convoluted system I just described and would probably take a ton of configuration, troubleshooting, and would look like a mess to achieve a probable worse result.

My primary use is to play music from Microsoft Media Player on my PC, over ethernet to the receiver which is connected to tower speakers. Right click on a playlist then click: cast to device-> 'receiver name' -- instant music. And control everything with the mouse: pause, play skip, volume etc.. That's how it worked with a similar Onkyo receiver-- very nice and convenient. It also works the same way on a Sony TV and a Samsung media box. But this Denon plays just one song and then stops. And with no controls except stop. Very disappointing. Irritating. There's no excuse. I'd love to hear from Onkyo on this subject. After a couple frustrating days I gave up and bought a 3 meter optical cable to connect it to my PC. Which works ok, except now I'm constantly having to reconfigure my computer to switch between the desktop speakers and the optical output. If I forget, the house gets blasted when I'm just intending to hear YouTube. One star! It fails at my primary requirement. Sound quality blah, blah, blah. Audio amplifiers were perfected 50 years ago. The failings of speakers and ears swamp any differences between products. The box says "DRA-800H STEREO RECEIVER". I expect a receiver to have a knob for radio tuning. It doesn't. Using the TUNE+/- on remote skips through a long list of presets set to an array of frequencies, most without signals. I missed the first quarter of the game flailing around in the app until I thought to try pressing the MODE button on the remote changing to manual tuning.

El receptor me llegó antes de tiempo y muy bien protegido. Tenía algo de temor ya que es enviado desde Estados Unidos y tenía miedo de que tuviera algún defecto y que lo tuviera que devolver o que en el mes que tengo para hacerlo tuviera una falla. Hasta el momento ha funcionado bien, tengo que comentar que el uso que le voy a dar es para escuchar música desde mi reproductor de cd, de vinilo y desde mi iPad con Tidal a través de Air Play y debo de decir que es lo que esperaba, con una gran calidad de salida del audio. Me gusta escucharlo en modo de sonido Pure Direct el cual considero que es el que es más fiel a las grabaciones. Tiene un gran volumen de sonido. No me decidía entre este modelo que ya tiene algunos años y el DRA-900H que es más reciente, me ayudó a decidirme que este DRA-800H lo obtuve con un buen descuento. El DRA-900H tiene resolución 8k y una conexión más, cosas que no ocupo. Excelente compra!

I purchased this receiver for KEF bookshelf R3, before they are coming, I just hooked it up with my KEF T301 slim speakers in hand for testing. I never thought that a pair slim speakers and Denon receiver can work together so well. The receiver is very powerful and even with 60 of volume, everything works fine, very good layers and focus. Denon is very warm, fast in bass, ( I hooked up a KEF $200 sub-woofer because slim speakers) . Easy streaming. No complain so far, because I only use the receiver as streaming DAC for my tidal account. No NAS, no Hard drive, no computer linked to the network at all. Heos app got lots of criticisms, I am ok with it, the app even shows USB jump drive songs and folders on smartphone screen. I am going to use my re-tired iPad air 4th gen as a remote and Heos touchscreen panel. I hope this Denon 800H can handle my new KEF R3 speakers well.

Substituindo o meu antigo Amplificador Pioneer Network por este excelente DRA800h Denon, Musicalidade, transparência e muita potencia, não aquece muito, baixa distorção e muita compatibilidade com rede de Streamers, poucas entradas analógicas, mas as digitais são suficientes. Faltou uma entrada Usb para transferência de áudio de um computador...! Muito feliz com a aquisição, Recomendo.

El Denon DRA-800H es un receptor estéreo muy práctico, ya que cuenta con múltiples conexiones como un receptor multicanal, que a diferencia de un home theater éste es más enfocado y/o construido para música sin dejar de ser eficiente para las películas o consolas de video juegos. Yo lo uso para alimentar un par de KLIPSCH-RP600M y mandar señal a un par de subwoofers activos KLIPSCH de 10". Al escuchar música en este Denon dra-800h en modo "PURE DIRECT" te das cuenta que vale la pena la plata gastada por el; sonido limpio, bien definido, bien detallado y con cuerpo. En cuestión de ver películas y reproducir el audio a través del Denon dra-800h en conjunto con las klipsch-RP600M creo que hacen un excelente match, El sonido es tan dinámico, situado, claro y detallado.

The clarity and crispness of the sound at all frequencies are incredible and superior to many of the older receivers/amplifiers I have used. Internet radio is much faster to connect than using a pc. Only had to use the online menu once to figure out how to turn on Zone 2 (click on zone 2 and the power button). Remote control app for the cell phone is great. Some have commented that power is inadequate but I do not agree. Lots of power driving 4 speakers. Also using a subwoofer that has its own power. This Receiver is for people that like the old school speaker set up, with all the modern features. Very impressed.