So .... after playing a bit with Denon 4311 and Onkyo 818 .....

No offense to Onkyo 818 owners but that unit is going back.

To me, even though sound was pretty good from Onkyo ... compared to Denon 4311 I found the following...

Onkyo 818

1) Sound felt a bit too plastic. Don't know how to explain it but Denon just felt more real. Maybe it's all in my head but I was there with a friend and even though he liked Onkyo too ... he felt the same about plastic sound. Denon felt more natural

2) Unit is wayyy too big. Barely fit into the space I had.

3) Knob felt cheap. Not providing a paper manual made me feel as if they were trying to save money on every possible thing and that means that there could have been many other things that got little attention.

4) Color on display. Sorry but huge turn off. Who uses that 15 year old green color on display and then adds light blue glowing color on the knob??? These 2 just don't go together and it looks bad. I am not a designer, but believe me ,,.,, if you care how your unit looks at night .... colors are bad.

5) Running Audyssey gave similar settings as Denon but not identical. I think Denon set speakers to large but crossover to advanced at 40hz fronts, 60hz surrounds. Onkyo set everything to 40Hz.

6) Denon has this nice info on the screen .... on left side of it it shows you the source capability like .... if it's dolby 5ch or 7ch or stereo ... and on right side of the screen it shows what your receiver is outputting. I like this info.

anyway .... i am sure i did not give Onkyo a fair chance. I had it on for about 3-4 hours, did not read the manual ..... cause it was on CD .... and packed it back into the box. My heart just wasn't with it.