Review on 📻 Denon AVR-S540BT Receiver: 5.2 Channel, 4K Ultra HD, Bluetooth, USB & HEOS Link Compatibility by Laura Thomas

UPDATE: I now have two Denon receivers, a more powerful Denon in the living room and a less powerful Denon in the bedroom. DENON is an excellent home theater system for all of the reasons I'll outline below. My PROBLEM with all Denon receivers is that they are REAL BEASTS for manual tuning. You can plug all your speakers into the right ports and spend hours, if not days, figuring out their overly complex and goofy screen interface. Enabling all the speakers is such a difficult task that many times during installation I wanted to throw out the Denon receiver and get another. Trust me, DENON systems are designed to be extremely tedious to set up and torture to install. To be honest I would have avoided Denon receivers until their so called engineers made it easy to set up speakers manually. All you have to do is indicate whether you want to do "ACTIVATE ALL CONNECTED SPEAKERS, YES or NO". Then have the properties of each speaker adjusted to your liking. Instead, Denon employs an intricate, labyrinthine menu and sub-menu system that is torture to understand, access, and implement during any configuration. The Denon system is especially BAD when trying to TURN ALL SPEAKERS ON. Denon receivers are a great system behind a horribly poorly implemented Gawd control panel interface that should be abandoned. I am now rating the Denon THREE STARS BECAUSE MANUAL SPEAKER SETUP IS A VERY VERY DIFFICULT NONSENSE TORTURE! It seems that Denon was designed by the best engineers and then passed to the worst interface programmers that have ever existed on earth! The developers of Denon Set Up Interface destroy an otherwise top notch receiver at any cost! I want to play my video games, enjoy my DVDs, watch Netflix, and stream Revain. This Denon AVR-S540BT home theater serves my basic needs well. I brought an 85" Sony 4K TV last Christmas, so I need a receiver that can take full advantage of my new system's 4K display technology, like the Denon AVR-S540BT home theater. Although this Denon AVR-S540BT home theater can be a bit noisy. that's not a ghetto rock blaster M&M's in the neighboring kitchen box of chocolates LOUD! Even at high volumes, the sound is not distorted. I would recommend using good quality speakers, speaker wire and HDMI connectors with this unit as cheaper connectors degrade video quality. Cheap HDMI connectors introduce purple noise at the edges of the screen that isn't present on higher quality HDMI connectors. No, I'm NOT saying you should use the $99 gold-plated HDMI connectors as that's useless. However, don't use the cheapest HDMI connectors, which are so thin that noise can get into the cable. Now, if you are in a huge building with elevators and lots of LED and other commercial lighting sources, you need HDMI cables that protect against RF noise generated by elevator motors, LED lights, and other RF sources. The antenna supplied with the device is suitable for most applications. The Denon AVR-S540BT home theater system is simple and easy to connect. You do NOT need expensive banana plugs to connect your speakers. Speaker connections are made using straight plugs to grip the push button actuated speaker wires. HDMI connections are easy. This Denon AVR-S540BT home theater features an intuitive layout that makes it easy to connect the right components. Because the Denon AVR-S540BT is a very basic 5.2 channel home theater device, it has few connection points and options. The dedicated subwoofer circuitry in this unit feels a little underpowered, not bad, but not the best either. The ease of use is impressive as it is designed so simply and clearly that you hardly need to read instructions for the basic functions of the Denon AVR-S540BT home theater. The user interface on the front of the Denon AVR-S540BT home cinema is tidy. For a basic entry-level home theater, the Denon AVR-S540BT has pretty much everything you would expect.