Dcan one actually speak of a home cinema when a narrow soundbar under the television tries to blow virtual 3D sound into the living room? Advertising does, and even we occasionally follow semantic evolution, albeit with a degree of forbearance. Because the term actually stands for an opulent installation made up of a number of loudspeakers which, when properly controlled, acoustically illuminate all dimensions of the room. Just like in the cinema, sometimes even better.
Matching hardware is still available today. And a community of perfectionists who prefer to dedicate a room in the house to the cinema installation is still active. She may be interested in a contraption Denon recently unleashed on the scene. It’s called AVC-A1H, works as an amplifier, switching and control center and promises to leave nothing to be desired for home cinema. This aroused our curiosity: what is going on in the audiovisual machine room these days?
Above all, the operation with a dizzying variety of channels: The AVC-A1H combines 15 output stages under its cover, which are vertically tight on separate circuit boards. Each, say the data sheets, makes at least 150 watts easy. This corresponds to a total output with which you could operate a kettle. The power supply was correspondingly bulky: the transformer alone weighs 11.5 kilograms.
What do you do with it in home cinema?
For example, you fire up the speaker configuration 9.4.6. In it, nine loudspeakers play on the ground floor, so to speak: Three cover the front channels, two further front loudspeakers are positioned slightly above them, two surround loudspeakers fire the listener from the sides of the room, two more take up a position behind his back. According to this scheme, six loudspeakers mounted under the ceiling of the room take care of the representation of the height dimension. And to reproduce the deepest roar, four subwoofers can play along – active models that connect to the amplifier’s preamps via cinch sockets or professional XLR connections.
Of course, this massive box insert is not mandatory. No power amplifier takes it amiss if it is initially only available for later stages of expansion. Or when, in bi-amping mode, it shares the power supply for a loudspeaker with another power amplifier. And if a subwoofer socket remains free, an original accessory can get involved: Denon offers exciters, i.e. dynamic converters that can be sunk into the plush chair of the home cinema in order to vibrate silently there as soon as the cinema scene is explosive. After all, the body listens. The entire amplifier phalanx can be subtly adapted to the speaker range. The adjustment procedures assign electronic branches and loudspeaker connections to each other, query the sizes of the boxes and record their distances from one another, they place the deepest tones on subwoofers or the bass membranes of floor-standing loudspeakers, and the calibration helps to ensure that the sound of a large number works the supplied Audyssey system.
Denon masters all surround dialects
As far as the processing of the digital sound formats is concerned, we can safely spare ourselves a list. The Denon masters all Dolby and DTS surround dialects, as well as Auro-3D and even Sony’s music format 360 Reality – in short, everything that is currently in circulation. And with a built-in multi-room component, Denon calls the responsible technology Heos, the cinema control center opens up all conceivable audio streaming services or retrieves music from the server. The amplifier’s video department also uses state-of-the-art technology. The HDMI connections can even handle image signals in 8K resolution and forward metadata of all HDR standards, whether Dolby Vision or HDR10+, and of course they also support the variable frame rates of game consoles.
We haven’t tried all the options yet, but we can already say: With a price of 7000 euros, the AVC-A1H is not for bargain hunters, but anyone who buys it will be technically secure for the next few years.