Denon AVR 8500H Flagship...perhaps Battleship?
Denon released their latest flagship model at this year's CES 2018 show in Las Vegas.
The AVR 8500H is the world's first 13.2 receiver, which simply suggests that it has 13 Channels of onboard amplification. This latest Dolby Atmos enabled receiver can support a full compliment of front height & front width speakers along with the required ceiling mounted units (4) without the need of any external amplification. Quite a feat!
That being said, our experience also suggests that most Home Theater environments will have some lesser combination of the above speaker layout. This opens the door to utilize the unused amplifier channels to discretely drive (power) Zones 2 & 3. This approach would yield up to a 9 channel speaker configuration, at the main Home Theater Zone, with the remaining 4 channels attributed as outlined above.
Incidentally, Denon has garnered awards in Europe (EISA) and America for their HEOS Ecosystem for best Multi-Room Audio system. All 2017 and newer AVR's have this kernel builtin and it essentially makes the AVR into a HEOS Music Zone for multi-room deployments.
The following is a quick view of this unit's feature set:
- HEOS Ecosystem Enabled...The "H" at the end of the model number
- Dolby Atmos, dts enabled
- Multi-Zone-3 Discrete Audio Zones
- Multi-Source
- Twin Video Zones
- 4K Ultra Enabled on all HDMI Inputs
- Free Downloadable Denon AVR 2016 Control APP
- Free HEOS control APP
- Support for DSD High Definition Music Files
- Twin Sub-Woofer Channels
- Audyssey Platinum Room Correction
- 13 X 150 Watts per Channel
- Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth
- AirPlay
- Quick Select x 4
- 50+ lbs
In not so surprising news, Denon was awarded a "Best of CES Award" for the AVR 8500H!
