I haven't run arc genesis yet, as I'm waiting to install my in ceiling speakers, and waiting on XLR's to arrive for sub woofers (coming today). So I'm not 100% on all that this has to offer.
I'm 100% prefacing this by saying it's possible that this is placebo effect as I obv haven't done a double blind test between the 70 and 7012. What I can say is that compared to my prior receiver, Marantz SR7012, 2 channel audio is MUCH better. The 7012, to me, when running Tidal directly through HDMI, it always sounded like there was a veil over the sound. Surprisingly enough, I preferred this sound on one of my test songs, Adele - Someone like you. When I used my Topping D90 MQA, everything from vocals to instruments sounded slightly shrill. Any other songs I always preferred hearing through the D90. Everything was much clearer, better instrument separation, etc. Yesterday I tried a few different songs I'm very familiar with; Sarah Mclachlan - Angel, Chris Jones - No Sanctuary Here, and Kacey Musgraves - Rainbow, and I must say the difference between the D90 and AVM70 were so subtle that it may have just been placebo effect for my minor preference of the D90 (maybe MQA vs non MQA?). I feel like if I went double blind between the Marantz and D90 I would be able to tell them apart, where the same wouldn't hold between the 70 and D90.
Few gripes I do have, I enabled CEC and yesterday it was turned off. Maybe checking for new firmware updates on Monday for some reason turned it off but I had to manually go and set it up again. There's no paper manual, and with the amount of settings I feel like there should be a 200 page manual. Audio Advice has a 30 minute tutorial set up video on youtube, and it seems crazy to me that Anthem provides no information about the tweaking and how you should adjust certain settings in the way that AA does in the video. Maybe it more of the person on the videos preferences. But for someone like myself who isn't overly audio science literate, there is going to be a bit of a learning curve as there is a bunch of tweaking available in ARC genesis. It will be a fun journey however.
I'm absolutely keeping this, and happy to get away from the D&M screens that looks like an they're from the 1980's
Regarding the amp. Nothing at all to complain about. Mine is DEAD silent. Connections feel nice and snug, good clicking and tight fit with the XLR cables. Trigger works perfectly, when the AVM70 starts up the amp powers right up and you hear all 4 modules double click and turn on. The power feels effortless and while my front 3 are only Focal Sopra No1s and Sopra Center (don't need a ton of power), they are driven with ease. The amp barely feel warm when in use, just ran it for 30 mins with the AVM70 set to -25db (remember, no other level changes from the processor). Oddly enough, the ASR thread on these, there are a few people in there who have the 125 and have odd hums and noise. I don't have any of these issues so it may be unique to the 125.
