I looked around quite a bit for the lowest price on the denon 3808ci, and at first glance, I couldn't find anything below the 1600 retail price AND have the 'authorized dealer' sticker. In fact, there aren't too many stores that are authorized from Denon (http://usa.denon.com/OnlineETailers.asp), and typically you want to have a manufacturers warranty on anything that you spend over a grand on. I've read somewhere that some updates might not work for non-authorized products, but I doubt denon would be that crazy. But you might want to double check if you do go that route.

Anyway, the place I ended up buying was at 6th avenue (http://www.6ave.com). Although the price is posted as 1600 online, just call them up and tell them you saw 1048 on http://www.avsforum.com/. I talked to a guy named Kevin, and he hooked me up. At nearly 1000 even, you can't really beat this receiver, although you could probably wait for the next best thing later in the year when Denon *probably* updates the 3808 with the 3809.

rafal submitted 5 months, 3 weeks ago
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When I carried my package across my apartment complex, I realized there was definitely some lead weights inside of this thing. It's heavy -- very heavy. But once you have it placed in spot, things get setup pretty quickly. Pretty much without reading the manual, I had almost everything setup. The only things I had to open up the manual for was to do a flash update (via internet), itunes streaming (which wasn't in the manual actually), and perhaps a few other little things. In general, the Denon menu is pretty intuitive so you won't need to look at the manual too much.

My first impression of the remote was that it was pretty cool, but it turned out to be somewhat disappointing. The receiver actually comes with two remotes (the main one, and another for another zone?). The smaller one seems more practical, while the bigger one I'm still trying to figure out. Even source select on the big one can be difficult to find.

As for reliability -- everything so far just worked. I forgot that hdmi inputs can only be output as hdmi (not composite, something I realized when I was forced to use a temporary tv before my hdmi tv came). Other than that, I'm using Twonkymedia for my media server (http://www.twonkyvision.com/Products/TwonkyMedia/index.html), and the denon can connect to it automatically after starting the server on my laptop. The cool thing about it is that you can actually control which songs you want from your denon GUI. The other internet streaming service I got working was SqueezeCenter (http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html). This allows you to stream music you host on your computer, but you have no control over the songs on your denon. It doesn't seem as nice from the receiver's point of view, but it's more flexible to work from on your computer, since you can import your whole itunes and make playlists with a pretty slick UI. Plus, it's free unlike TwonkyMedia, so that's a plus.

Does anyone else know of internet streaming software for mac and the denon 3808 that I could try? So far, I like the TwonkyMedia solution the best because I don't have to mess with my laptop :)

rafal submitted 5 months ago
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