Hi Gents,
Thanks for chiming in. Before I read your posts I decided to go back to basics and dug out "the old Radio Shack SPL meter " (As panteragstk put it. It seems we think a bit alike. At least my SPL meter is digital
).
I went into manual setup, and ran test tones with the LF as reference at 75 dB. Choosing that speaker to start was easy as it's Denon's default for test tones. The starting point by default also uses the Audyssey set levels, and not 0.0 dB. (Which I thought was a bit weird, but who knows, you've got to start somewhere...)
So after ramping up the volume on the LF, I toggled through all of the speakers and most were bang on, except one of of the rear Atmos was down 1 dB, but that could have easily been my fat head in the way. (I didn't bother to tweak it for 1 dB. At least not now.)
Of course the Left Surround (LS) was cranking it out at
85 or 86 dB and I didn't want to leave it there too long as it drives the Family wild (and me too) as it's very annoying at that volume - even with the door closed. I then pulled it down from +11.5 dB and when it got to Zero -=> voila 75 dB.
IMHO there can't be anything wrong with the connections, or the LS speaker for that matter. (Leemix, thanks for trying, but remember this is not my first rodeo. The LS and RS are within the Dolby specifications position wise, as are all of the speakers in the room. It's my 3rd Denon HT Receiver in the House, and my 5th HT Receiver overall (The other two are Sony. I'm a bit of a nut.). I use a tripod to mount the Mic, and make certain it's absolutely vertical with nothing in the way to any of the speakers. (There is only a single Lazy Boy chair which I drag out of the way before testing.) All the test tones sounded routine - the Altecs of course were far louder than the rest.
The "old" Denon AVR-S900W receiver didn't have this issue when I disconnected it on Sunday, so I could plug in the 4400. I guess I could plug in the S900W again just to confirm it's the 4400 - once and for all. Or maybe I'll call Denon first in case they've got some magic reset for Audyssey I don't know about. I really don't want the hassle of returning this, and would like to work through it if at all possible.
I too typically manually adjust the crossovers, and sometimes even the distances on the lower tier receivers. Usually the crossover needs a little tweak, but some of these are just silly.
As some reviews chimed on about how good the 32 bit Audyssey performed on the 4400, I was expecting near perfection. My plan was to buy the App and set this up via Audyssey in various speaker configurations (remember there are 9 channels of amplification and I've got 11 speakers plugged into the 4400), saving each configuration back to the App; so I could easily switch without re-running Audyssey every time. If I have to do everything manually, it will be a pain.
As I mentioned elsewhere my REW skills are in their infancy. So without a decent Audyssey baseline, tweaking will take weeks, maybe months... This is frustrating and not what I was expecting..