Setting up a Denon home theater receiver

J.R., Crutchfield sales advisor, shows us how the Denon setup wizard makes setting up a home theater receiver fast and easy. Shoip our current lineup of Denon home theater receivers.

Setting up a home theater receiver using the Denon setup wizard | Video Transcript

Hey. We're in the Crutchfield Lab today. We've got a Denon receiver set up and I wanted to take you through the setup wizard that you'll find on the '12 series Denon receivers. It really makes setting them up something anybody can do.

When you first plug in the Denon receiver and connect it to your TV with an HDMI cable, this will come up on the screen. And it's called the setup wizard. And just like on your computer — you've seen setup wizards there — this is pretty similar and it sort of guides you through setting up your speakers, your connections, your audio/video sources, your TV, and all the stuff you need to do to get a home A/V receiver working.

The first thing it'll suggest you do is go with a language. You can choose English or Spanish. Next it'll take you through your speaker connection setup, and it'll even have a little graphic here showing you a typical home theater setup. This one is a 5.1 setup because this is the AVR-1612. Models above this will have seven channels so you'll see even more speakers on the screen there. But it tells you about how to hook up your speakers and about where you should place them.

Speaker calibration

So once you have all the speakers connected, the setup wizard will take you through speaker calibration. To set up your speakers and calibrate them you're going to grab the microphone that comes with it, mount it on a tripod kind of like we have here, and set it in your various seating positions. So you're going to put this tripod right on your recliner and get this microphone right at about ear level. Once you've got the microphone in place, you'll get the calibration wizard going. It'll play sounds through all the speakers and it'll measure the distances of the speakers and the sounds bouncing off the various surfaces in your room so it can get a sort of an acoustic picture of what your room looks like and make sure it sounds like a theater.

Source setup

So once you've got your speakers all set up and connected and calibrated, it'll take you through source setup where you plug in your Blu-ray player and your DVD player and your television and all of the different sources you're going to use, and it'll guide you through the best connections you can make with each of those sources so you can't really mess that up. And lastly, it'll help you get your remote set up just in case you want your Denon remote to control other sources like your Blu-ray player and your TV and your cable box. It certainly is nice just having one remote.

So when you're done with the setup wizard, you'll know because it says "Congratulations!" and you've completed the job. If you ever need to get back into the setup wizard it's pretty easy. It's just part of the regular menu and it does come up automatically when you first plug it in — so it's very easy to do the setup.

So if you'd like to talk with one of our advisors about the Denon receivers or the setup wizard or anything else, just give us a call.