Totally understand what you mean about the bass routine! That's awesome! I have a Yamaha RX-V1065 and it uses YPAO, which is basically the same as Onkyo or Denon's Audyssey; although I've heard Audyssey works a bit better. My Yamaha has a Pure Audio setting as well, but it only runs the fronts in that mode, no sub
. I'd listen to music in that mode as well, but the JBL bookshelves I'm using on that system pretty much need the sub. Glad you're enjoying!
The hardest part for me to overcome when I first used it was actually doing the sub set-up properly. I'm going back a few years now, but if I remember right I was supposed to set the volume on the sub itself at 1/3. I remember thinking,"Really? 1/3? That's not going to work, it's way to quiet". But against my worse judgement I did it and it sounded amazing! The volume on my sub is at about 1/3, and the sub volume on the reciever is somewhere in the middle.
I got all my bad listening habits from my dad. It was hard to break the ole 'turn the bass and treble up and turn the loudness on' habit; but over the past 10 years I've finally come to understand why that sounds so terrible. Now I'm pretty much flat on all of that and never use the loudness button. And slowly but surely I'm learning that it's way better to start at super quiet and go up than it is to start at super loud and go down, if you know what I mean.
I still go over to his house and I'll turn his stereo on only to find all his tone adjustments, boosters and whatever other frequency boosters they throw on stereos turned all the way up
! I want to say, "Really, does that honestly sound better to you??". But he's my dad so I let it go