Multichannel music tweaks for the rest of us
Do you have golden ears? If so feel free to stop reading here as this is for the rest of us. If your hearing is less than perfect due to age, abuse, disease or what ever, this may be of some help to tweak your sound system. To be honest about it, this is to fine tune your system just for you. I don't care what my guests think. I'm the one that invested the money & if someone else doesn't like the way my system sounds, let them get their own.
I feel that this helped my system. Dramatic change? Nah. Will it help yours?? Am I hearing things courtesy of the placebo effect?? Maybe. In addition to some hearing problems my room isn't perfect by a long way & I have a mixed bag of speakers in my 9.2 setup. Since my sound system / home theater is in my living room I am not interested in acoustic treatments. My loving wife has been very tolerant of me stuffing speakers everywhere + I don't care for the looks of treatments either.
Living out in the middle of nowhere I have not had the opportunity to try this on other setups, so let me know if it helps you.
Lastly, before we get to it, I'm not going to talk about speaker positioning, microphone positions, etc. That has been beat to death in other threads.
If you have room correction software in your AVR, run it if you haven't already done so. After that is done, I turn Audyssey off in my Marantz. This is not the same as direct mode. I recommend writing down the settings for speaker levels that you have now. If you don't like the results of this, you can restore these & be right back to where you are now.
Sit in your usual listening position.
Next, select stereo mode. Using a track that you are familiar with, adjust the level of the left or right speaker if necessary until the voice or instrument sounds centered between the speakers. Pay attention to how loud the voice or instrument in the center is.
Next select the multi channel stereo mode. Your AVR may call it something else. Replay the same segment that you listened to while evaluating the loudness of the center & adjust the level of the center channel to match what you heard. Switch back & forth until your are satisfied it is as close as you can get it.
Next, select which ever pair of speakers are next. For me they are wides, if you don't have them it will probably be the side surrounds. Adjust the levels of those until they blend in with & support the fronts without calling much attention to themselves.
If you have rear surrounds, repeat again with them.
When you are done you should have a fair approximation listening with closed back headphones. Most of sounds should sound like they are inside your head. The center channel will probably not be inside your head depending on the what you are listening to.
Feel free to repeat the entire process beginning with the stereo section until you are satisfied that you have the sound balanced to your hearing.
Adjust your sub(s) if necessary for the bass you prefer.
Select the sound mode that you like. I prefer listening to music using DTS Neo:X, others prefer Dolby. Play a track that has some part of it that has something playing from both sides at the same time. Tweak as necessary to get the loudness equal on both sides if necessary.
Since different music has different mixing, try several different tracks to see if you need to do some minor tweaks. This usually takes me awhile. Eventually you should get to where the settings are good for most music.
If you prefer to have your room correction i.e. Audyssey engaged and or Dynamic EQ, Dynamic Volume or whatever, turned on, do so. I have come to appreciate having it turned off, but that is just my preference for my hearing, system & room.
Finally, when watching Blu-ray movies I often raise the level of the center channel as necessary to help with understanding dialog. Remember to set it back when listening to music.
