Just an update. The 1300w arrived about a week ago and I set it up last Tuesday and goofed around with it a bit. I have since used it to watch TV/Shows with family over thanksgiving, unfortunately, only my wife and I (okay, my wife more likely tolerates) full blast commercial cinema SPL, so I haven’t had a chance to fully give it a workout yet.
Ran some test tones through it with it calibrated to 75dB at frequencies where the worst impedance dips occur as measured by sound & vision, slowly turning the volume level up until the amplifiers clipped or speaker distorted. These were mostly low frequencies, thankfully, else, my wife would have killed me for causing such a racket. Managed -4dB across all channels before reaching mechanical limits on the front left and right, and -2dB on the center, with the test signal routed to all channels. Safe to say, the receiver has more headroom than the speakers, so power won’t be an issue.
One issue I’m noticing though, is running through the test tones, the SPL meter routinely measures the sub 3dB lower than it actually is. The only explanation I have for this is that the bandwidth of the pink noise must extend lower or roll off lower making the C weighting curve skew my results. An old onkyo had the same issue. Might just double check using the Dolby 5.1.2 test tone video.
I will say, the receiver just seems better than the onkyo overall. The streaming services aren’t nearly as glitchy, and the ability to choose between dsu and neural x regardless of input is nice. I’ve also noticed that many of the issues with Neural X upmixing I experienced with two channel is non existent in the Denon, which is strange, the onkyo mangled two channel content with neural x upmixing but sounded great with multichannel. There must have been some sort of processing between the input and neural X processing that screwed up the behavior of the decoder. Might be time for an updated review.
While I haven’t had time to properly calibrated it with Audyssey, the quick run through I did didn’t seem to do too bad, outside of the fact their “target curve” rolls the HF response off on the direct measurements of my speakers, my guess is that this is likely due to the fact the target curve assumes a falling response off axis, whereas the directivity of my speakers is fairly constant off axis. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I’ve always had poor results with Audyssey, I’ve always used it with Klipsch speakers. It might do better with regular dome tweeters that actually do the roll off off axis. Hopefully I can fix this with the app and just limit the correction to the bass.
The avr is a bit lighter and smaller than the onkyo, although the power supply is similarly sized. The onkyo is a class A/B, while the Denon is a class D, so the amount of heat sinking required is significantly less.
Only real issue I’ve had is “muscle memory” from the Onkyo remote layout. Always instinctively pressing the wrong damn buttons and then behaving like a technologically illiterate grandpa trying to figure out what happened or what I did lol!
Really need to get a good universal remote. Between the BDP, Roku, Satellite box, AVR, and TV (though the tv that comes with vizio smart cast TVs are all but useless) I’ve constantly gotta keep track of like 5 remotes.
Hoping the CEC functions work better through the Denon on the BDP. The onkyo was a sort of Russian roulette with the remote, outside of the play/skip buttons, it was anyone’s guess what each button would do or if it’s do anything, hit the wrong button, and movie times over...at least temporarily lol.
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