Hello and Advice Requested

[stanfnelson]

OK point taken. If you haven't figured out yet, I do a lot of "figuring"...I am a maximizer, which is good when you are an audiophile that works for a church, you have to make every penny count. Here is what I am thinking about based on your recommendations:

How important is the Denon front end piece? We are basically talking about enough money to fund the Horizon, the HTMs or CBMs and at least one sub. Rather than running all of the video through a 4k receiver and really simplify the system, I could run separate HDMIs from all my sources to the 4K TV and use my ONKYO TX-NR807 as audio central and use the TV as video central. So, my power, DACs and video processing is not optimized, but I would have all the speakers.

Where do the priorities lie?

[sludgeogre]

OK point taken. If you haven't figured out yet, I do a lot of "figuring"...I am a maximizer, which is good when you are an audiophile that works for a church, you have to make every penny count. Here is what I am thinking about based on your recommendations:

How important is the Denon front end piece? We are basically talking about enough money to fund the Horizon, the HTMs or CBMs and at least one sub. Rather than running all of the video through a 4k receiver and really simplify the system, I could run separate HDMIs from all my sources to the 4K TV and use my ONKYO TX-NR807 as audio central and use the TV as video central. So, my power, DACs and video processing is not optimized, but I would have all the speakers.

Where do the priorities lie?

The priority is always the speakers first. I think it is totally fine to use your current receiver for amplification and use your TV as the switch if you are OK with doing that. You'll have plenty of power, so you should be good to go.

Also realize that unless the source you're using is 4K, it doesn't matter if you use the receiver or not. There isn't a lot of 4K content besides a few things on Netflix and the new UHD Blu Rays. Other than that, everything is still 1080P, so using your current receiver, it would look exactly the same. The only time you'd need to bypass the receiver is if you're actually watching 4K content.

[stanfnelson]

Right. We already have a 4K Genie. We have some 4k content on the Mac.

I think I am going to pass on the Denon at the moment and see what I can swing in speakers alone...

[Jaybeez]

The RAAL towers are magnificent speakers. They are a bit out of reach for this father of 3 college students, and I ended up with Sierra 2s and a Rythmik F12SE sub.

When my kids graduate, they'll get a modest present. I however will get a new set of RAAL towers, and build out a whole new HT set up, all Ascend. I won't mind a bit that it will be 5.1, and start with a 15 year old Denon AV Receiver.

As long as I can remember, the adage "start with the speakers" has been around and well supported. Nowadays, a well designed listening space is often ranked up there with speakers in terms of importance.