So, got the AVR on Friday. Yes, I know I'm behind, and the world has moved on to the x10 (310/510/710) series, but it was a deal I couldn't pass up, plus I liked the fact that it was 7.1 capable vs. the newer 310 which has been neutered down to 5.1. I thought for sure something had gone wrong with the shipping, but the UPS guy pulled up at 7:30. The initial setup was a real PITA, not because there was anything particularly complicated about it, but just dealing with disconnecting everything, reconnecting everything, moving things around, etc. Maybe I am just getting old! I ran the system without any room correction for the first few hours, just to get a feel for all the setup menus and unaltered sound.
I have to say, the sound is noticeably different than the Denon that was replaced. To my ears, and by no means am I an audiophile, nor do I have any scientific data to back this up, the Anthem seems to have a great deal more definition to the sound. It's more clear, more refined sounding, tight (if any of this makes sense). I wasn't immediately blown away by the sound, but it is most definitely different.
Eventually I ran through ARC. It was a little bit of a headache, nothing major, but just dealing with the cabling and making sure the laptop I was using was stable, etc. I found that moving things around (laptop or microphone) was prone to causing the connections to drop. This wasn't a real big deal since in most cases it would pick right back up where it left off, but it did require a little more attention to detail.
It was interesting to see how ARC dealt with various things. I noted the various crossovers that it selected, and the room gain, and decided to let ARC do what it wanted to do for the first go round. Needed to familiarize myself with things before I started tinkering.
Afterward, I ran through several movies, and I have to say, the difference between the sound on the Denon with Audyssey and the Anthem with ARC is quite noticeable. The Anthem significantly reduced the sub output, which took some getting used to initially, but I noticed right away how much clearer and cleaner the sound was.
Initial impression is that ARC is actually quite good at what it does, and the graphs in ARC showed that the sub wasn't capable of any useful output below about 50Hz. Guess that's what you get with a cheap sub. I think in the prior configuration, I was trying to push the sub to get output from it that it really wasn't capable of producing in the first place, and this was causing significant distortion, and making the actual output muddy and just generally not good.
For the remainder of my speakers, ARC selected a crossover of 60Hz.
Yesterday, I decided to get brave and do another calibration, but this time, I wanted to do some experimenting. I decided to uncheck the box and do separate settings for movies vs. music. I have some good multi-channel SACD recordings that I wanted to listen to, and in the past I've found that they sound much better with most of the speakers set to a more full-range configuration. I don't really care about the analog vs. PCM thing, for me the digital conversion is fine.
So, I decided to change the crossovers for the music preset, and I set them to 40Hz.
To my surprise, this was not a good choice. I ran through DSOTM, and some other SACD material, and very quickly discovered that I was asking way too much of my cheap Polk speakers. Feeding them a 40Hz crossover quickly drove them into distortion at any real volume level. I also noted high-frequency distortion in some instances.
Conclusion here is two-fold.
1. The Anthem is definitely capable of more real-world output than the Denon. This may not be by a large margin, but there is definitely more overall power available at the tap.
2. These cheap speakers have got to go! They've got nothing to offer below 50Hz (including the "sub"), and they can't handle being driven on the top end either.
In the end, I think this new AVR is a significant upgrade for me. However, it has pretty quickly revealed the weak points in my setup, which is essentially everything but the receiver and the television it's connected to!
Thought I would post a follow-up, and it seemed like it belonged in a separate thread vs. continuing on the speaker discussion.
