The saga of the Audio Video Receiver

My friends gave me a Denon AVR-4306 Audio/Video Receiver. I have not worked with an AVR for decades and thought it would be a piece of cake.

To my surprise, the AVR comes with a 147 pages manual. And hooking up a passive Subwoofer is not a straight forward task, and may not even be recommended. The manual can be found at 

http://usa.denon.com/us/downloads/pages/instructionmanual.aspx  Look under Archieved Products.

Firmware upgrades for Denon equipment can be found at http://firmware.denon.eu/. Be sure you have the serial # handy to get into the site.

The unit is very heavy and biased to the left side.  The HDMI ports are fairly easy to connect. So are the left and right speakers.  The problem I had is that there are no terminals to connect a sub-woofer to. (those red and black terminals - you can see two rows at the bottom right)

Apparently,  sub-woofer requires more energy/power to drive, and hence, an Active Sub-woofer is assumed to be used with a typical AVR.  So to connect an active sub-woofer, the speaker is connected to the Pre-Out connector labelled with "SW"

I only have a passive sub-woofer, and two very small bookshelf speakers, which I had from a previous legacy system (eg. think cassette era).  The bookshelf-speakers were already hooked up, and I also added a center speaker (but due to the size, it is put somewhat to the right side of the TV)

The Ethernet cable for LAN, the FM radio antennae as well as the AM antennae were all self-explanatory and easy to install.

This is as far as I have gotten, and will report in the next article and my saga to power up the AVR.