Revisiting this again. Wonder if anyone has discovered over the last year why the Marantz SR7012 requires all this work to sound decent without a sub. No amount of tweaking without a sub can produce a nice dynamic sound. Not trying to rattle the house here. Just want to hear the bass at times. Maybe get the woofers to move a little air. See them move a bit, which is required to get any noticeable bass at a medium volume.
Speakers are SVS Prime Towers.
I experimented with this and found the only way to get some bass out as I described, the low end of the EQ has to be maxed out and also max out the bass in the tone settings. Even then one would think when those settings are bumped all the way up, it would be way too much bass. Its not. It’s as if the settings were set to +1
In this experiment, I only had the 2 towers on. No surrounds. No Audessey.
I’m tempted to move on away from the Marantz if I can’t get it to perform without going through all the BS. It shouldn’t be this difficult to get a unit like this to perform as expected.
It's been almost two years so lots got forgotten but may be re-visit the following:
1) The prime towers have two 6.5" bass drivers and specs say 30 Hz-25 kHz +/- 3 dB so assume -3 dB at 30 Hz
2) sensitivity 87 dB/2.83V/m
3) Measured impedance was below 8 ohms in the 40-1,000 Hz range, though >6 ohms between 60-70 Hz
Based on specs, the SR7012 should be capable of driving out the bass unless you sit far from the speakers and/or you like very high spl.
Additional points, again, might have been covered two years ago:
- If you don't run and use Audyssey, the problem may be your room that has some serious cancellation resulted in major dips in the bass range.
- If you did run and use Audyssey, whatever the room gain there was might have been removed because Audyssey uses a flat target curve, so if the room was bad for the bass to begin with, Audyssey might have made it worse for you.
- Instead of working on Audyssey by using the Editor App to do some quick tweaks, you might have just turned Audyssey off.
So if the issue is the room, to solve that you can work on room treatment, use Audyssey but use the $20 App to customize the target curve to you liking (i.e. more bass in your case).
Using a different AVR is not going to help, unless you know the SR7012 is defective in some ways. If the SR7012 is working normally and you did not mess up any settings, then it has to be your room