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(More customer reviews)Overall, I'm satisfied with my Denon S-52. It's very well-built and feels very solid (it weighs over 14 pounds!) with impressive build quality. The WLAN antenna on the back is detachable so you can use a different Wi-Fi antenna if you need extra range.
For just popping in an iPod or CD and playing it, this thing works like a dream. It supports CD-R's burned with files (like .MP3's or .WMA files) and thumb drives work well. It won't span sub-directories for continuous play so you have to dump all your files in the same directory if you want it to play everything continuously. The CD mechanism is among the quietest I've ever heard, and the loading mechanism is _very_ smooth. I've seen high-dollar CD transports that have done worse.
The large clock display is easily readable. Alarms clearly indicate their wakeup time on the display whenever they are enabled. The separate, push-to-latch buttons for each alarm make switching alarms easy and fool-proof.
The device sounds quite good on its own -- Denon clearly spent time and money designing the speaker enclosures to be relatively free of unwanted resonances, and the speakers have adequate high-frequency response. Denon uses Audyssey bass-boosting technology to increase apparent bass which works relatively well but unfortunately is undefeatable should you hook up a subwoofer. Adding a powered subwoofer is easy because of the mono RCA (phono-jack) output on the back but adjusting it is difficult because the Audyssey technology sounds muddy when accompanied by a subwoofer. I would recommend a subwoofer with variable frequency, volume, and phase controls -- switches won't give you the adjustability you need to blend the subwoofer with the radio.
The Denon only gave me the option to wake to CD (including CD-R) or Internet radio. It didn't even offer me FM or USB thumb drive. It's possible I missed something -- the manual seems complete until you get the thing on your table and start asking detailed questions, and then you realize they left a lot out.
The clock auto-setting feature works well only if you have a local SNMP-enabled device that keeps (or gets) proper time. If you don't, the Denon will "auto-set" to the first one it sees. If the SNMP device it happens to find on the Internet doesn't have its time set properly, your time will also be wrong. It won't tell you or let you tell it where to look for the SNMP server, either. I wound up enabling the SNMP server in my access point solely to auto-set the time on this clock! It would be helpful if it would look for an NTP server instead since it only wants the time. The only way I found to reliably get it to "re-auto-set" the time (if it got it wrong the first time) was to have it look for updated firmware, which seems to cause a total system reset. You do have the option of manually setting the time, which seems to disable the auto-setting (but the manual is silent on this issue).
The only way I've found to play music back from a PC is to use Windows Media Player as a server. I had no luck trying to get it to play directly from a shared drive. I had hoped this would work with my other network music players from [...], but it doesn't seem to recognize SqueezeCenter as a music server.
Setting the S-52 up for a protected wireless network was about as troublesome as I could imagine. It insists on having you enter your network key (for WPA or WEP) one character at a time with a jog wheel, after which it _immediately_ "masks" it with an asterisk. And since the display is only 20 characters or so long, once you're around character 25, you'd better not lose your place! Also, it doesn't give you the ability to enter a space (ASCII 32) (incidentally this tidbit is also missing from the manual), so don't use them in your key. Forget about being able to correct mistakes -- while it's technically possible, you'll never figure out where in the string you are or which asterisk is hiding the character you need to change. They really need to re-think how this works -- WPA keys can be up to 63 characters in length and future revisions will only get longer.
The Denon saves all settings to some sort of non-volatile memory. It has no battery backup if it loses power, but it remembers what time it was when it was lost and it looks for the SNMP server to get the time as soon as power is restored. This makes power failures relatively painless, but it might not be a bad idea to have a backup battery-powered clock if waking up is critical and you live in an area with unreliable power.
Not a bad first try from Denon. All the hardware seems to be there -- most of the problems I had can be attributed to poor firmware design or a lack of flexibility in options. Assuming it's possible to defeat the Audyssey EQ in firmware with a future revision, Denon could address each of these problems in a future update. Until then, this unit is quite usable even if it doesn't live up to its potential.
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