People have argued with me over the years in how good this room correction is. Years ago I found it terrible in my square 15' x 16' x 8' room. It's crossovers, levels, and distances were all wrong besides it's sounded shrill, harsh, bright and irritating. I tried several times and results were always the same. That was with my 2011 Denon AVR-2312ci's Audyssey MultiEQ XT.
So I now have a Denon AVR-X2800H with the same Audyssey MultiEQ XT so I decided to try it out once again. I did manually set up my system with a calibrated sound level meter with C weight and Slow response. I also measured out with a tape measure, all the speaker's distances.
The great thing about the new Denon models is that they have 2 speaker setting presets. So I left my hand setup on Preset 1 and Audyssey on Preset 2
Well I wanted to get a fair estimation on how accurate this Audyssey is so I only used one listening position, testing it 5 times for overall accuracy. This is where I hand calibrated the system.
I do have 3 sets of headphones that had their frequency response tested by a reputable lab and they are all fairly flat and obviously have no room modes to interfere with their frequency response.
Well I have to say this receiver's Audyssey is better but not by much. The distance calculations were within .5 ft which is pretty good. The subwoofer was off by 4.5' but bass can be tricky.
The sound levels were actually really good mostly within .5 db of my hand measured levels except the Subwoofer which was way off at -12 db. This microphone and Audyssey system can't be used for Subwoofer setup as it's very very inaccurate in the bass frequencies which messed up everything in the speakers as well. This is the same characteristics I seen in my other receiver which is pretty disappointing as people think these are good systems to use. I have 2 hand sound level meters and the oldest one which hasn't been calibrated in years, is about 2 db off from the caibrated sound level meter in the bass frequencies.
Also, you can see where this Audyssey inaccuracy in the bass has just ruined the rest of the room correction. Besides the subwoofer level being off, it set my center speaker to have a 40 Hz crossover which is just insane as it's bass is low before that point. Then it actually set my Elac bookshelf speakers to full range which they have a tested and measured -6db at 46Hz!! Definitely not full range!
I did adjust everything correctly as Audyssey couldn't. I set my bookshelf and center speakers to 80Hz as the subwoofer does all bass duty, and setup my subwoofer level to be -4db below the main speakers. it did drop the main speaker levels to -3db. As I said, taking that into account, all levels were correct except the subwoofer level.
Now here's what threw everything off. It jacked up the equalizer setting really bad! Jacked up the low bass about 8db while bringing 80 - 100 hz to 0db killing any bass punch in music. Then it lowered the lower and center midrange frequencies making voices sound thin and not natural. It then jacked up high midrange and treble to near 8 db again.
Everything sounded horrible, bright, fatiguing, hollow, thin, and harsh.
I did run Audyssey again to have the same results.
This is the same result I had with the older 2011 Denon AVR-2312ci!!
So I thought well, I know my headphones are flat except having a universal boost in the bass across all frequencies. Headphones sounded great nothing like the horrible sound I got from Audyssey.
Heres another thing, I have small surround satellite speakers that have a rated bass rolloff of -3db at 135 Hz. The Audyssey set their crossover at 100Hz, where an optimal crossover is between 120H to 150Hz.
Since the Equalizer jacked everything up to +8db, even with main speakers set at -3db level, the speakers were still louder when doing an A/B comparison with Preset 1 (hand calibrated) and Preset 2 (Audyssey calibrated). Preset 1 sounded great, and natural, not artificial sounding as the Audyssey setup.
This is just a horrible system and I know some love theirs but I honestly can't see how anyone could listen to that horrendous noise that Audyssey makes of the music and soundtracks. Hopefully it's just my room and Audyssey is incompatible with square rooms because I don't want to question everyone's hearing.
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Unfortunately, Audyssey's terrible performance mirrors what I had on my other Denon AVR-2312ci in the same room.
Tell me it's just incompatibility with square rooms. If so, they should state so in their documentation.
