Dear Friends,
My current set up is Samsung 55 Inches 3d Smart TV, Denon AVR X2200 with Dali Zensor 5 Floor standing, Dali Zensor Vocal as centre, SVS as subwoofer and Dali Zensor 1 as Surround and Pioneer BDP 180 as my Blu-ray Player. When it comes to movies I am pretty much satisfied from my 5.1 effect. But when it comes on playing music from Pioneer BDP-180 like I have who lot of collection of original Audio CDs / Flac & Wav files I was not getting that crystal crisp clear music and that clarity feeling is always missing. All these while after reading a lot of forums and Blogs I got to know that Pioneer BDP 180 has got a very good DAC and should work properly as it has to be connected to the AVR via ARC Analog cable as currently in my setup the connection is via HDMI Cable which might be one of the issue.
I have a similar setup - Dali Zensor + Denon AVR
I have a few theories about less than perfect music playback
1) WASAPI
When playing WAV and FLAC on your computer, use a player with a WASAPI output (Foobar/JRiver). This plugin sounds much better than the default used on Windows
2) Dali Zensors have a very creamy smooth sound signature and the Denon is neutral. If you had used Yamaha instead of Denon, you would have gotten a little brighter sound (which sounds crisper)
(or if you had bought some other bright speaker like Klipsch instead of Dalis)
Unfortunately there is no way to prove this theory unless you go to a showroom and listen to Dali and Yamahas together
3) The source files
A lot of audio files sourced from the internet can be less than honest copies.
And lot of Indian music especially tends to be less than perfectly recorded, hence even original CDs sometimes lack that sparkle which a good source should have
Just an example (not sure if you have listened to Lucky Ali) - There was a compilation released called Get Lucky (in 2009 I think)
Listen to that vs his original albums
The songs in Get Lucky have been remastered and sound amazing, compared to originals. So the recording matters a lot
In your current setup (HDMI), you are using the DAC on your Denon
Personally, I think the DAC on your Denon AVR would be pretty okay, and the Pioneer BDP is unlikely to be miles better - so unlikely you are going to gain much from using DAC on Pioneer