Used equipment, your views..

allanco

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I've never had the opportunity to build my own home cinema, (have looked over the years and drooled over other people's setups! ) that is set to change next year as I'm due to build my own house and will incorporate my own.
I've been into films and music all of my adult life, but I have to admit I no longer believe the newest equipment is always the best and having had tinnitus for the last 10 years the absolute best sound quality is probably lost on me.
As an aside I've been comparing Tidal with Spotify over the last week, having taken advantage of Tidals 3months for £3 and I can't tell the difference, but that is probably me at fault.
Anyway I've seen an 11 year old Denon AV receiver for sale here at a reasonable price. My two questions are, will there be much life left in it and has the technology changed so much in the source material that there will be obvious omissions in the sound (apart from Atmos).
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
 
What model Denon?
 
Look for something else other than a Denon if music is going to be played through it. Not Denon's forte by a long way and I speak as a high end Denon owner.
 
It is the Denon AVR-1910, I didn't really want to mention it as I realise any critical views could potentially upset the seller
I'd be using it mainly for AV as I have a few amps and one of them would be fine for music.
 
I don't think you are at fault with regards to tidal, I honestly thought it was crap.

I'd personally shy away from older amps receivers. Not totally sure why, I think in my head there's more to go wrong.

I have no issues with speakers and did just that. New my front 3 would be 2.5k I didn't pay anywhere close to that.
Granted they're a fair few years old but good speakers remain good speakers they don't change that much year on year.
 
The tech will be out of date, old hdmi version and no atmos

So if you want 1080p in surround sound OK but don't expect uhd with ceiling speakers. It's a bit pot luck with how long it would last electronically it could go for a few more years or more. I'm assuming this is a cheapish second hand thing. I have a 1909 nowt wrong with it but the tech won't do 4k so it's sat in the loft. Don't think it's worth anything these days.
 
My speakers are 20-35 years old, my amps 30+. It’s not because they are cheap or any other reason than they sound superb. Some components age and get replaced at service intervals others sound as good as the day they were first fired up or usually much better

HDMI was never about audio quality just convenience and licence laws

Some things have progressed, some things really haven’t. I only moved from using analogue out of a BR player this year, simply because it sounded so good and spending huge sums on replacement processing didn’t offer an improvement. My current processor is over £10k retail and sounds superb

But it really doesn’t make my old Denon 3800 BR player with excellent analogue out sound poor, it’s better in many ways and I can now do justice to Atoms and the later formats. But it’s not as bigger gap as you might expect

That’s not for any other reason than the old Denon is still excellent in this area.

Some old kit will fail. I’ve never had a preamp, power amp or fail that I can remember, old disc players can be troublesome on occasion. How many brand new high end items suffer from HDMI problems ?

In short there is nothing wrong with old well made kit, I have 9 of these amps 4 are about to be serviced, the last time this was opened was 2004 and it’s working fine but service is recommended every 10 years so I’m going to get it serviced

9A176D6B-7C4A-4486-AF12-A02470978E22.jpeg
 

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