Thank you for the review.
Regarding the Audyssey portion, I am glad that you finally gave it a shot and have been pleasantly surprised. You should know however that distance and level settings are relative, and not absolute. So, the levels are not necessarily off.
Also, the distance accuracy of Audyssey has been stated by Chris to be finer than 0.1' ft, IIRC. If you describe your setup to him, you might ask how this might have happened. Perhaps additional filters with certain speakers means that new delays have been created. But, yeah, 10cm is what, like 0.0003 of a second?
Marantz has always been a generation behind with Audyssey tech. They only even released the XT version when the XT32 became available with other brands. Historically, they are sometimes known not to have enough processor power to simultaneously use Audyssey with things like advanced codec decoders, or matrixing for extra channels. I doubt this would be an issue with this processor, however.