#Thx surround ex install

A quick call to Birch-Jones, and another AVR-4800 was on the way. Attempts to resuscitate the receiver were fruitless, and the true cause of the problem was never identified (footnote 1). Buzzzz! I was greeted with the aroma of freshly toasted printed-circuit board and a front-panel display flashing distress.

#Thx surround ex install

There was no space! I fussed and fumed, twisted and turned, but the Denon's back panel didn't give me enough room to install the large, thick spade connectors of my audiophile speaker cables.ДЄfter 20 minutes of sweat and swearing, checking that no spades were touching, I stepped back and turned on the receiver. But years of hooking up Krell monoblocks-with their very widely separated speaker terminals-hadn't prepared me for the Denon. How did I connect the seven pairs of loudspeaker wires? Not carefully enough! I thought it would be easy. Denon's David Birch-Jones had the answer: Use one of the AVR-4800's digital coaxial inputs, found at the bottom of its rear panel, but use the setup menu to tell it that the DVD player used that input. Obvious, impulsive decisions, such as plugging the yellow interconnect from the DVD-370 into the AVR-4800's corresponding DVD inputs, resulted in dead silence. Even when I could make out the lettering, it didn't always help. Read the factory manual, you say? Not without my 8x Loupe to decode Denon's microfiche-sized diagram legends. Then I had to identify the appropriate inputs on the AVR-4800's rear panel. In addition, the line sources-the Lexicon MC-1 and the two DVD players-were within the 1m reach of my interconnects. My only choice was to place the AVR-4800 on a piano bench next to my equipment stack. Besides, my equipment stack didn't allow easy access to the AVR-4800's rear panel, and believe me, I had to get back there often during the review to change inputs and outputs. It couldn't go in my equipment stack-the Mirage HSM center-channel speaker had to go on top of that. It couldn't go on the floor, because its front panel had to be visible to the infrared remote (and to me). The receiver was too deep and heavy to fit on a shelf. Similarly, the AVR-4800 will immediately switch to DTS 6.1 for the Saving Private Ryan DVD.ДЇinding the best location for the AVR-4800 was not as easy as it sounds. The THX EX data flag in the DVD triggers the receiver's EX mode, which sends the additional matrix-derived rear-channel signals to the rear surrounds. If the AVR-4800 is correctly set on Auto, then it independently sends the signals to its THX Surround EX processors when The Haunting DVD is put in the player. Voil ga-the bright red DTS flag appeared on the AVR-4800's display panel, and music played. Only then did I learn to toggle the deceptively simple Input button on the remote. After two hours of fiddling, I finally read the manual. I couldn't get any sound from my DTS 5.1 music or video DVDs, no matter what other switches I tried. I learned how important this control was one day when I had inadvertently switched it to PCM.