RX_V2400 volume question

[im timmy]

<font color='#A8A8A8'>same here, volume on my 2400 for movie's is around -22 or so, and on the low end late at nite news, tv etc. around -35. &nbsp; How anyone would want to go past or even think about +0db's and beyond I can't imagine. I'm with Hawke, inefficient speakers, settings, or a service on the receiver. That if all your gear isn't blown already.</font>

 

[lr7bubbleboy]

<font color='#000000'>Thanks for your thoughts. I am returning my receiver. From reading all of your comments and trying different things there is definitely something wrong. Once
Again thank you for all of your helpful comments.</font>

 

[RX-V2400]

<font color='#000000'>Keep us up to date. You did not tell us your speaker impedance or sensitivity, did you? Do you have the 2400 set to 8 ohm? If you set to 6 or 4 it will contribute to the symptoms you show.</font>

 

[Guest]

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>

lr7bubbleboy : <font color='#000000'>Zumbo, I appreciate you trying to help. The point is it does matter to me. I believe that there is a problem with my receiver or that something is not set right. If you heard my receiver at +6.5 db. You would understand. my ears are FAR from bleeding at +6.5.db's. I just thought that someone out there may have a thought as to why I have this problem. I hope I'm not upsetting anyone with my questions.</font>

<font color='#000000'>I don't personally own this Yamaha, although I plan to, but did you check if there is any &quot;compression&quot; in the sound? Like Dynamic range control? Or dialog normalization which is about the same?

</font>

 

[Cmon69]

<font color='#000000'>I understand what your saying, I went and bought the Harman Kardon AVR7200 receiver, and When I put a music CD in my DVD player I can crank that Harman Kardon AVR7200 receiver more (Loader) than my Yamaha ever could and the sound quality is unbelievable, but when I put a DVD in I cant get it to crank up to the same volume level as with a Music CD. When I'm watching a shoot'em up movie I turn them up and the volume wont go any higher, and my old Yamaha was much louder when watching a DVD or my Sat. TV. I tried messing with all the different setting and still couldn’t get that volume up there!

I'm finding that the volume (MUSIC CD -V- DVD/SAT.) level is not the same when the dB is!</font>

 

[RX-V2400]

<font color='#000000'>It is all to do with how the various units spread the power between the channels. When you get the set-up right all will be revealed. It takes a while.

The 2400 is not that good for stereo, but great for movies. So I have a NAD very powereful stereo amp suplimenting the two front main channels. Stereo or Neo 6 Music is great, better than NAD alone, and movies are awsome.

Even in my 6000 cubic feet theater -10db is max you can take for movies and 0 db for music.</font>

 

[bob griffiths]

<font color='#000000'>

&nbsp;Hi im new to this forum so be nice please

Isnt this all a bit spinal tap my amp goes to 11 etc
The displays for levels on amps have never been a reliable tool thats why most people who set up the things for a living have SPL meters and test discs .
self calibration systems in my experience have tended to be pants!
pioneer /yamaha latest systems do not work properly every time .I often check them with my SPL meter and find them way out.Once you do the auto cal it often does restrict certain options .

The original poster may have had several problems

low sensitivity speakers as others have mentioned

incorrect user settings

faulty amp

but he also may have had this type of problem

Years and years ago KEF the speaker company set out to design a reference set of stereo speakers the engineers used master tape(no CD then) and very high powered Amps now a couple of engineers started to go deaf .They realised that distortion is one que to the human ear to indicate loudness .because the signal was so clean they didnt realise it was that loud.
When people upgrade from a basic amp to a much better one often they dont hear the same distortion so they think its not as loud a good way to test this without a SPL meter is play it at a &nbsp;loud level with a music disc and talk to someone often you find you cant hear yourself never mind the other person.When previously you could on the old so called louder amp.

just my 2p from the UK</font>

 

[RX-V2400]

<font color='#000000'>Bob makes a good point about how quality sound is more tolerable loud and how bad sound sounds loud just because the high clips hurt the ears. High volume is used to show detail - to make small secondary sounds in the recording comprehendable and give depth and breath. Also most of your power goes to the bass, so if you cut the bass it is easy to make the top end very loud, but it is lousy sound.

As I have said before, for a big room and demanding recordings, the RX-V2400 is a little low on powre reserves - that is why it is is much cheaper than the Z9 which is basicaly the same thing with a bigger power supply. Now don't get confused between rated watts per channel and power. Rated watts per channell mean nothing if the power supply can not give the dynamic headroom. The 2400 has very poor dynamic head room (which is not that important for movies but is for serious classical music). While rated at 125w/c the dynamic power rating is only about 160w/c where as the NAD I have added on the front end (see below) has dynamic power of 600w/c.

An economic way to make a 2400 to a Z9 is to do what I have done and add a stereo power amp to run the two main channells and let the 2400's power supply handle the souround sound. You must of course, this is a given, use a powered sub-woofer. Don't drain the 2400's limited power supply even further by asking it to drive a sub-woofer!</font>

 

[Guest]

<font color='#000000'>Hi!
This post made me interested enough to check what my 1400 does.
Scale did go up to +8db and the bar in the amp somewhere in middle.
Next day i did some setup things(lot's of) and now it goes to +9db.

I just wish that i knew what affects it,cause i got plenty of volume,thankyou very much.</font>

 

[trj222]

my 2400

I just tested mine and it also would only go to +6.5 db. Of course the only way I will put it that high is with the speakers off! If I am listening to the tuner, It is very loud at -15db. But, If I watch a dvd, I can crank it as loud as it will go. After reading many of these posts, there are alot of people having problems with volume control with the rx2400. I manually set the power level for my front speakers and I am satisfied with the music. However, like I said...Watching movies is a different story, it is not loud enough. I have it set up with an optical cable and quality 12 guage speaker wire.

 

[av_phile]

Bob makes a good point about how quality sound is more tolerable loud and how bad sound sounds loud just because the high clips hurt the ears. High volume is used to show detail - to make small secondary sounds in the recording comprehendable and give depth and breath. Also most of your power goes to the bass, so if you cut the bass it is easy to make the top end very loud, but it is lousy sound.

As I have said before, for a big room and demanding recordings, the RX-V2400 is a little low on powre reserves - that is why it is is much cheaper than the Z9 which is basicaly the same thing with a bigger power supply. Now don't get confused between rated watts per channel and power. Rated watts per channell mean nothing if the power supply can not give the dynamic headroom. The 2400 has very poor dynamic head room (which is not that important for movies but is for serious classical music). While rated at 125w/c the dynamic power rating is only about 160w/c where as the NAD I have added on the front end (see below) has dynamic power of 600w/c.

Nice discovering this thread. I couldn't agree more.

 

[XJJack]

I was hoping to find more of an answer here on this subject, because I am disapointed with the max volume of my 1400. I know I don't have that great of speakers, (I want to build some of my own to fit my space). But I am wondering if the 1400 will be enough for me, what confuses me is that I have Sony speakers now that are supposed to be able to handle 100 Watts RMS and I have changed peramiters and made ajustments to speaker placment and have had the system auto setup and have done things on manual setup, but when I do "crank" it, it never does get to much of a distortion level (barley noticable to my ears) and the max volume seems to be different each time I reajust the setup. So what is going on here? Is it limiting my power to keep me from cliping or is it an impedence issue (all are 8 ohms) or is it the same max volume and it is changing what 0db is? I'm lost...

 

[joelincoln]

XJJACK,

IMO, a good receiver should not produce noticeable distortion when the volume is turned up to max (unless something is wrong)... and you have a good receiver. So you shouldn't expect that kind of effect.

Anytime you adjust one of the level/EQ settings on these receivers, you may impact the max volume display. This is normal. There is, understandably, a maximum output power that the receiver can produce regardless of settings. This is an electrical limitation of any design. This receiver is smart enough to know this. So, if you tell the receiver to output power to the left front channel (for example) 6 dB higher than the right in order to maintain proper balance in your environment, the receiver cannot really increase the max power to that speaker. Instead it reduces the overall power of the system so that when max power is called for, the max power only reaches that left speaker and the right one will always be 6 dB lower... 6 dB lower than max power. The result is good balance at the sake of a loss in total output power (lower volume) which is reflected in the display.

If you set all of your level/EQ controls to flat, and turn the power to max, the display should show a much higher number and you will be producing truely maximum power out of the system. But you will have sacrificed proper balance. Try to find a happy compromise.

 

[Unregistered]

Thank you that does make sence when looked at that way.

 

[annunaki]

<font color='#000000'>You can blow a 600 watt speaker with a 10 watt amp!

Underpowering will blow a speaker before overpowering.

The cause is turning volume into distortion levels!

First rule of audio. DO NOT underpower speakers!
Second rule. DO NOT turn volume into distortion levels!</font>

FALSE! FALSE! FALSE! Your first statement is COMPLETELY FALSE!!!


I cannot believe I missed this!

If underpowering blows speakers, everytime you turned down the volume to a low level, they (speakers) would blow.

Speakers fail for two main reasons:

1) Voice coil failure

2) Mechanical failure

I will elaborate on both here.

Mechanical failure: Mechanical failures are almost always due to over powering. Torn spiders, surrounds, cone/former neck joint separations are caused from too much power being sent too the woofer causing uncontrolled motion. Clipping with less than rms power can also cause this, once in a while, due to odd order harmonics tossing the woofer beyond its mechanical limits. In this case the clipped power exceeds the rms power of the speaker. This will be explained more below.

Voice coil failure: The only way a voice coil fails is if it receives TOO MUCH power over time. Let's get a fact and definition out of the way first.
Fact: When an amplifier FULLY clips it will decrease dynamic range capability and increase average power. Usually doubling its unclipped continuous power. Even people with "golden ears" will drive an amplifier to small amounts of clipping.

Power compression- when a speaker's thermal power handling is exceeded, it will not result in much increased output but rather just add unwanted heat to the voice coil and top plate resulting in diminishing performance. The unwanted heat develpos from the speaker not being able to move much farther to cool the coil. If a speaker stays in this state for too long the voice coil melts.
Here are a few examples to illustrate what I am trying to say.

Example 1:
Let us say we have a 100 watt speaker with an unclipped 50 watt continuous amplifier. If our 50 watt continuous amplifier fully clips to 100 watts,our speaker's voice coil will NOT fail. The power level has NOT exceeded the thermal dissipation limits of the speaker. It will not sound very nice when this happens but it will not fail thermally. The only possibility for failure here is a mechanical one due to odd order harmonics. Even this is rare as the power level present should keep cone travel within mechanical limits.

Example 2: Now let us use our 100 watt speaker with an unclipped 100 watt continuous amplifier. If this amplifier were to fully clip, it would output 200 watts of power, causing thermal failure, mechanical failure or both. Even 50% clipping with this amplifier will have a high risk of failure. However, this is typically the best amplifier to use (for most listeners), as reaching clipping is fairly rare because of high volume levels and dynamic capability.

Example 3: This is the big one here. Let us use our 100 watt continuous speaker with an unclipped 200 watt continuous amplifier. If we run this amplifier to 200 watts of continuous unclipped power on our 100 watt speaker we will have a voice coil failure if left for too long, even though safe levels of distortion are being observed. (too long here would probably be a matter of minutes) Why? because we have exceeded the thermal dissipation limits of the speaker. With the extra 100 watts of power we may have added 1 or 2 db of overall output and dynamics, but we have also added a couple hundred degees to the voice coil temperature with no proportional cooling movement. We have effectively sent this speaker into power compression as we did above except this still sounds "clean", the amp is unclipped. The possibilty of a mechanical failure at these levels has also increased greatly.
Even if this was a 150 watt continuous amplifier we would still see a failure, it would just take a little extra time. We would still have an extra 50 watts of "clean" power wasted as heat on the voice coil. Too much average power over time blows speakers.

My recommendation would be an amplifier/receiver capable of, or within, 15-20 continuous unclipped watts or so of the speakers continuous power handling capabilities.

Sorry for the long post.