Advice for disappointed new owner of a Denon RCD-N10

[MrSpanman]

Ok I will admit it, I just joined the forum to ask some questions, and will probably never darken its door again. To be honest I have very little Hifi related experience, although I am technical-ish.
I am going to waffle on a fair bit below, but to cut to the chase I will then ask for anyone else’s experience of the Denon RCD-N10, because TBH I am unsure if the setup and interface is just flaky or I have bought a lemon.

I bought my last Hifi system nearly 30 years ago. A Denon D100 mini system. Over the years I have had a couple of sets of speaker with a pair of Mission 760i’s for the majority of that time. Ffwd 25 years and the CD player block stopped working, I know outrageous, unreliable rubbish!
Got a used replacement, but 5 years on and that too has gone down and not long before that, one of the Mission woofers went intermittent, break in the coil I think as I removed the woofer and the fault is internal to the speaker.

Someone bought me a pair of Q acoustics 3030i’s for Christmas (completely unbidden, she must want something) and with nothing much to drive them I started looking for a suitable mini-system. I wanted it future proof and fancied something with Heos too. I tossed up between the Marantz X 612 and the Denon N10. Denon won on price and my previous experience of how bullet-proof the D100 was.

Got the N10 today, spent @2 hours trying to get it set-up. Initially tried to get it to connect to wired LAN. Connected via the LAN cable that I normally use to connect to my telly and quite happily streams HD Netflix etc, but the N10 said “no connection” whenever I tried to connect.
After a fair few goes it decided to connect, then disconnected by itself. Anyway eventually it connected and held the connection for more than a minute. I turned on Tune-in radio and streamed the first station I came to. It worked for about 30 seconds and then cut out. This happened on the next few stations I tried. I was also suitably unimpressed with the tinny nature of the sound, maybe its just the bit rate of the audio I thought.

Decided to connect via Wifi so disconnected the LAN cable and navigated to the menu to switch off Wired and switch on Wifi. It wouldn’t let me select that option and kept telling me to “disconnect the LAN cable first”, which I had already done. Did a few “IT resets”, i.e. turned it off and on again. No joy, it still thought I had a LAN cable attached. Eventually I RTFM and did a network reset, it forgot about the phantom LAN cable and connected via Wifi ok. Tune-in radio works ok via wireless interface, at least without dropping so far.

Next, the sound. Sound seems very disappointing. I got the rest of the families’ opinion and this ranged from “tinny”, “no bass”, “isn’t the RH speaker of balance, way too loud compared to the left” to “ sounds rubbish, please turn it off, I hate it”.

So does anyone else have a flaky set-up experience with the N10? If so I am guessing it doesn't bode well for either the future longevity of the system, or me growing to like it. Has anyone else failed to get it wired via LAN and what could possibly be wrong on the sound side. Am I expecting too much? Might the 3030i's not play well with the Denon?
I was expecting to be blown away, and I wasn’t the least bit impressed. In fact I would go so far as to say when I turned it off and put my telly back on the sound from its built-in speakers was nicer than from the Denon/Qs. Might I have I been sent a duffer?

I will fiddle with the bass, treble tomorrow and crank it up a bit to see what happens but "you cant polish a turd" as they say. At the moment its going straight back.
Any opinion or advice welcome.

 

[RBZ5416]

Try a firmware update over WiFi.

Check the bridging plates are secure on both speakers.

Check the speakers are definitely wired in phase.

If the LAN issue persists after a firmware update send it back.

 

[peter312]

As far as the sound goes, have you tried your old Denon and the new one through the same speakers? That will help identify if the new speakers are part of the issue. (I personally am not keen on the smaller Q Acoustic speakers).

If your old Denon has a more traditional class AB amp, it may be you don’t like the sound of cheaper class D amps (like to one in the new Denon or indeed the Marantz unit you mention). I found them a little weak but have been more than happy with the amp in my PM7000N. Whilst I suspect that unit is more money than you might wish to spend, there is the Marantz NR1200 which is a similar price to the 612.

Sorry, that does sound a little negative - it’s not intended to be - but I hope that it is of some help.

 

[bobel]

I'm really sorry to hear you having problems with this machine. I got one last year and it's been good ever since. First set-up was a bit clunky for the Heos account and pwd setup, but passed that everything was so smooth. If using non denon speakers, ensure you set the 'speaker optimiser' function to 'OFF'. This feature is ON by default and it is meant to work with denon speakers only. This is recommended in the manual as well.As with connectivity, my unit is connected with my home wifi network on the 5 ghz band. It works flawlessly with internet radio up to NAS drive FLAC files playback. I even streamed 2.8 mhz DSD albums and it goes really smooth when connection is on a stable 90 - 100 mb/s. Have you contacted your hifi dealer/retailer? If you get it up and running properly, it will make justice of your speakers and i'd invest on good speaker cables (ie:company chord clearway/rumor x).