Yamaha RX A3060

[TheWarrior]

Ahh projector, OK. Phil 3s with external amps Quite the system Sir! Sounds like you have a fun little project going, and a happy wife is a win win. Yeah, I've read on several forums about quirky issues with Denon and Marantz (HDMI, network issues, etc.) I bought a Denon 6300 and returned it last year. I tried everything, i just couldn't get it to sound good for 2 channel in my room. Yamaha's have all been rock solid for me.

I would be interested to know how the 3060 performs as a pre-amp if you plan to use it in that capacity.

I agree with you on the TV situation. I opted for a Sony 930D, it's not Plasma or OLD, but I'm not unhappy with it. It is not perfect but it does have a good picture.

On the room correction. I know a lot of people like Audessy, partly because it EQs 15 cycles below what YPAO does, but I just didn't think it was all that. I have to admit, I have not done measurements or tried to EQ myself. I downloaded Room EQ but I don't have a mic yet. I would pay somebody to come over and show me how to do it. LOL......if I though it would make an audible difference in my room.

The 3060 will run center and surround duty. The Phils are wonderful. The only issue I can cite is the ribbon suffers compression losses with some movies that have too much content for them to reproduce at once. But for music, especially any type of stringed instrument, they dominate!

Glad you found a TV you like! I kinda wish I nabbed the last Panasonic plasmas when they went on clearance, but a 65" was still 4x what I paid for the Epson 2045. So we'll see if it can run in the same league with picture quality. But that's also why I'm respecting its 'entry level' output, and limiting the screen size to preserve black levels.

After studying Sound Reproduction by Floyd Toole, his AES paper 'Calibration of sound reproducing systems' and even engaging in many conversations with him, I see why he does not subscribe to audyssey or ypao. In domestic rooms a 'good', loudspeaker which he and his team have been able to quantify with CEA 2034 (a measurement standard), should not need anything other than tone controls to adjust for varying content above the transition frequency of the room. Below, (usually 200 hz) the room is firmly in control and no super sub can change that. The wave lengths are so large that your room boundaries dictate what frequencies will receive too much or too little energy and must be individually modified with 1/24 octave measurements on REW. A lower resolution like 1/6 octave (default for REW) will mask all those peaks and dips.

And that's the short version ;-)

 

[little wing]

The 3060 will run center and surround duty. The Phils are wonderful. The only issue I can cite is the ribbon suffers compression losses with some movies that have too much content for them to reproduce at once. But for music, especially any type of stringed instrument, they dominate!

Glad you found a TV you like! I kinda wish I nabbed the last Panasonic plasmas when they went on clearance, but a 65" was still 4x what I paid for the Epson 2045. So we'll see if it can run in the same league with picture quality. But that's also why I'm respecting its 'entry level' output, and limiting the screen size to preserve black levels.

After studying Sound Reproduction by Floyd Toole, his AES paper 'Calibration of sound reproducing systems' and even engaging in many conversations with him, I see why he does not subscribe to audyssey or ypao. In domestic rooms a 'good', loudspeaker which he and his team have been able to quantify with CEA 2034 (a measurement standard), should not need anything other than tone controls to adjust for varying content above the transition frequency of the room. Below, (usually 200 hz) the room is firmly in control and no super sub can change that. The wave lengths are so large that your room boundaries dictate what frequencies will receive too much or too little energy and must be individually modified with 1/24 octave measurements on REW. A lower resolution like 1/6 octave (default for REW) will mask all those peaks and dips.

And that's the short version ;-)

If you offered a course, I'd sign up.

I think I know what you mean about ribbon Tweeters. My Ascend Towers have them, and I think they are a little better for music then movies. But overall they sound really really good.

 

[TheWarrior]

Haha! Floyd's book is a 500 page course on the subject. A life's work is an incredible amount of information to absorb. But if you want to learn how to squeeze the best sound out of any room, it's invaluable.

Yeah ribbons can do wonderful things, but they are sadly limited. I also seldom exceed 85db watching movies, unless it's something with music and then I crank it up for the songs.

Back on topic: Does the RX-A3060 have any bands of EQ where you may select a specific frequency and adjust its specific Q and amplitude? I've been spending quite a few hours getting the bass sorted in my room, starting with a pair of SVS PC12's that have 2 bands of PEQ. But I also have a dip above 150 hz that I am attempting to sort with the Phil 3's distance to wall behind them, but I think that will only get me so far. I've got a custom sub I built with SEAS 10" woofers with a minidsp plate amp that I'll be programming this morning, and it should be able to solve the remaining bass issues below the 80 hz crossover. But I need to sort that mid bass issue... I am a huge Rush fan, and I want ALL of Geddy's notes!

 

[little wing]

Haha! Floyd's book is a 500 page course on the subject. A life's work is an incredible amount of information to absorb. But if you want to learn how to squeeze the best sound out of any room, it's invaluable.

Yeah ribbons can do wonderful things, but they are sadly limited. I also seldom exceed 85db watching movies, unless it's something with music and then I crank it up for the songs.

Back on topic: Does the RX-A3060 have any bands of EQ where you may select a specific frequency and adjust its specific Q and amplitude? I've been spending quite a few hours getting the bass sorted in my room, starting with a pair of SVS PC12's that have 2 bands of PEQ. But I also have a dip above 150 hz that I am attempting to sort with the Phil 3's distance to wall behind them, but I think that will only get me so far. I've got a custom sub I built with SEAS 10" woofers with a minidsp plate amp that I'll be programming this morning, and it should be able to solve the remaining bass issues below the 80 hz crossover. But I need to sort that mid bass issue... I am a huge Rush fan, and I want ALL of Geddy's notes!

500 pages, wow, that's thorough indeed. Sounds like a fascinating book.

So I wish I was home playing and listening to my new toy, but, alas, I'm in on-site with a customer in Chicago (So I can pay for my new toy! HAHA ) But, I do remember the 3060 has a 7 band equalizer, that is kinda of scattered through out the frequency band. The Q and gain are adjustable if I remember correctly. I get back home late Friday night and can give you more details about the manual eq this weekend. You can manually EQ the sub down to something like 15 Hz, I believe.

Love Rush by the way. Moving Pictures and Red Barchetta is one of my all time favorites.

 

[PENG]

The 3060 will run center and surround duty. The Phils are wonderful. The only issue I can cite is the ribbon suffers compression losses with some movies that have too much content for them to reproduce at once. But for music, especially any type of stringed instrument, they dominate!

Glad you found a TV you like! I kinda wish I nabbed the last Panasonic plasmas when they went on clearance, but a 65" was still 4x what I paid for the Epson 2045. So we'll see if it can run in the same league with picture quality. But that's also why I'm respecting its 'entry level' output, and limiting the screen size to preserve black levels.

After studying Sound Reproduction by Floyd Toole, his AES paper 'Calibration of sound reproducing systems' and even engaging in many conversations with him, I see why he does not subscribe to audyssey or ypao. In domestic rooms a 'good', loudspeaker which he and his team have been able to quantify with CEA 2034 (a measurement standard), should not need anything other than tone controls to adjust for varying content above the transition frequency of the room. Below, (usually 200 hz) the room is firmly in control and no super sub can change that. The wave lengths are so large that your room boundaries dictate what frequencies will receive too much or too little energy and must be individually modified with 1/24 octave measurements on REW. A lower resolution like 1/6 octave (default for REW) will mask all those peaks and dips.

And that's the short version ;-)

Congratulations! The 3060 is an excellent pick, nothing beats it in the $2,000 price point. Regarding YPAO, I hope you will be open minded to give it a try. Surely Dr. Floyd Toole is highly respected in his field of studies, but so are many other PhDs who specialize in REQ/calibration technologies. If you put them all in the same room you will bound to hear different opinions and some good debates.

I know for a fact Audyssey XT32 works great for me integrated two subs and my mains, and I have REW graphs to back that up, in 1/12, or 1/24 smoothing the difference is very obvious. XT worked too but I felt I could do a equal or better job doing it manually. Many people swear by Dirac, Trinnov, and some others. YPAO may just work well in your room, you never know unless you try.

 

[TheWarrior]

500 pages, wow, that's thorough indeed. Sounds like a fascinating book.

So I wish I was home playing and listening to my new toy, but, alas, I'm in on-site with a customer in Chicago (So I can pay for my new toy! HAHA ) But, I do remember the 3060 has a 7 band equalizer, that is kinda of scattered through out the frequency band. The Q and gain are adjustable if I remember correctly. I get back home late Friday night and can give you more details about the manual eq this weekend. You can manually EQ the sub down to something like 15 Hz, I believe.

Love Rush by the way. Moving Pictures and Red Barchetta is one of my all time favorites.

I've got about 2 weeks for delivery ( not totally sure why, but the price was right). Thanks for the info, that should give me enough to work with. My custom sub has a minidsp plate amp that allows mostly unlimited adjustment. But the SVS subs may need additional help dealing with my open living room. KEW's thoughts today reflected mine in that they mostly sound good but in several instances they were a bit over powering. Two subs really aren't enough in my room to get good bass at every seat. So I need to get my DIY sub programmed and see if it can offset their limits.

...And the meek shall inherit the earth

 

[TheWarrior]

Congratulations! The 3060 is an excellent pick, nothing beats it in the $2,000 price point. Regarding YPAO, I hope you will be open minded to give it a try. Surely Dr. Floyd Toole is highly respected in his field of studies, but so are many other PhDs who specialize in REQ/calibration technologies. If you put them all in the same room you will bound to hear different opinions and some good debates.

I know for a fact Audyssey XT32 works great for me integrated two subs and my mains, and I have REW graphs to back that up, in 1/12, or 1/24 smoothing the difference is very obvious. XT worked too but I felt I could do a equal or better job doing it manually. Many people swear by Dirac, Trinnov, and some others. YPAO may just work well in your room, you never know unless you try.

Thanks! I'm excited, haven't bought a new receiver/pre in a long time. Really no experience with Yamaha, I was a long time Denon fan but have experienced a number of failures that have left me weary. Haven't heard any reliability issues with Yamaha(in their premium units anyway) and cutting out Audyssey licensing saves a pretty penny!

I am interested in hearing what YPAO does, namely if it is based on the commercial theater x curve that artificially rolls off speakers early. Propagation loss is natural over distance, and audyssey killed the highs of the ribbons on the Phil 3s.

You've mentioned your appreciation of the bass response before. Feel free to send me your 1/24 or 1/16 octave measurements with phase. It's practice for me, and I may be able to spot something that could further help you!

 

[little wing]

Congratulations! The 3060 is an excellent pick, nothing beats it in the $2,000 price point. Regarding YPAO, I hope you will be open minded to give it a try. Surely Dr. Floyd Toole is highly respected in his field of studies, but so are many other PhDs who specialize in REQ/calibration technologies. If you put them all in the same room you will bound to hear different opinions and some good debates.

I know for a fact Audyssey XT32 works great for me integrated two subs and my mains, and I have REW graphs to back that up, in 1/12, or 1/24 smoothing the difference is very obvious. XT worked too but I felt I could do a equal or better job doing it manually. Many people swear by Dirac, Trinnov, and some others. YPAO may just work well in your room, you never know unless you try.

Thank you PENG! I did a lot of research before I purchased the Yamaha 3060, and now that I've had it for over a month, I'm convinced I couldn't have made better a decision. The sound is stellar, and it's easy to set up and use. I ran it the first day without running YPAO. On the second day I did run it from 5 different positions. It tightened up the bass and the highs seemed a little clearer and the overall sound was more focused. I was just wondering if REW might do an even better job, but I have all good things to say about YPAO, without having seen any graphs. I am very much enjoying going through my music collection these days!

 

[PENG]

Thank you PENG! I did a lot of research before I purchased the Yamaha 3060, and now that I've had it for over a month, I'm convinced I couldn't have made better a decision. The sound is stellar, and it's easy to set up and use. I ran it the first day without running YPAO. On the second day I did run it from 5 different positions. It tightened up the bass and the highs seemed a little clearer and the overall sound was more focused. I was just wondering if REW might do an even better job, but I have all good things to say about YPAO, without having seen any graphs. I am very much enjoying going through my music collection these days!

I believe to get best results from any REQ system, it is best to follow instructions exactly, save the results and then you can experiment some more like moving the MIC positions slightly, more, or less positions and see if you can further improve the results. It is time consuming and you really need to invest in a $75 Mic and download REW for free. I don't use REW to do any EQ, just to guide me in getting the best out of my system.

 

[PENG]

Thanks! I'm excited, haven't bought a new receiver/pre in a long time. Really no experience with Yamaha, I was a long time Denon fan but have experienced a number of failures that have left me weary. Haven't heard any reliability issues with Yamaha(in their premium units anyway) and cutting out Audyssey licensing saves a pretty penny!

I am interested in hearing what YPAO does, namely if it is based on the commercial theater x curve that artificially rolls off speakers early. Propagation loss is natural over distance, and audyssey killed the highs of the ribbons on the Phil 3s.

You've mentioned your appreciation of the bass response before. Feel free to send me your 1/24 or 1/16 octave measurements with phase. It's practice for me, and I may be able to spot something that could further help you!

You mentioned REW defaults to 1/6 but that is not true, though I have seen more graphs posted using 1/6 smoothing. I think SVS might have suggested 1/6 smoothing for telling the big picture. Unless your room is perfect, it could be extremely hard to get anything that resembles a flat line in the lowest octaves, so 1/6 may in fact be best to get you dialed in quickly in the 10-80 Hz range. After that you can play around and see if you can do better by tweaking something else including some sub crawling.

I don't have a before vs after graph done on the same day so the graphs below will show different levels. Not sure if that's the best one I saved either. That 50 Hz dip looks odd to me right now, it was there but I thought I had a better one.

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

Iirc, I've read that 1/6 is closest to the resolution at which we hear. Also, I think that graph should be scaled from 45-105db. As is it looks a lot smoother than reality, and appropriately scaled would give a better idea.

 

[PENG]

Iirc, I've read that 1/6 is closest to the resolution at which we hear. Also, I think that graph should be scaled from 45-105db. As is it looks a lot smoother than reality, and appropriately scaled would give a better idea.

I agree, was in a hurry so just go with default, but it is not hiding anything because smoothing is 1/48, they actually look the same even with smoothing removed.

 

[PENG]

Okay, change scale to 60-90 dB on the vertical axis.

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

Wow, went the other direction, lol. Just so you know, I wasn't going after you. Just making an observation.

 

[TheWarrior]

Okay, change scale to 60-90 dB on the vertical axis.


View attachment 20243

Since we're talking about bass, phase data is paramount. Need to see smooth swings in the phase without small breaks in the slope. 1/48 is actually too high, I did that too, Floyd told me to dial it back. There's too low a resolution that masks large peaks/nulls, and then there's too high where you blur the phase data. The following is 1/24.

I am in the middle of retuning my system. Dual SVS PC12's and a DIY twin sealed SEAS L26RO4Y which still needs to be programmed the for its new sealed alignment - I effectively copied the Orion open baffle design and tried it as sub. (will be building the L26ROY in the future - lower fs)

Baseline after moderate physical placement testing of the PC12s only



Improvement after applying filters and adjust the Q to specific axial modes - the PC12's have two-band PEQ with preset amplitude and Q values, so some adjustment was possible, but not nearly to the degree of the minidsp



Current: which KEW just heard, and complained that there was often too much bass - there should be a steady rise from 20 hz, flat is NOT the goal! I totally failed to tell him about this when he was listening... was trying to prove a point, oops!



And thats where it stands. Adding the DIY sub requires turning the PC12s down, which they need to be anyway so I still have a good bit of work ahead! There's still a resonance at 60 hz (length mode - room dimension predictions said there would be two 1st order modes 62 hz and 68 hz) that I haven't been able to sort, yet. That dip above 150 hz (2nd order width mode) may be treatable just by adjusting the distance of the Phil 3's to the wall behind.

 

[TheWarrior]

Of relevance:
http://www.audioholics.com/loudspeaker-design/audio-measurements

 

[PENG]

@TheWarrior, thanks for posting yours. If I can find some time today I will use the same scale and 1/24 smoothing so we can compare our graphs more easily. In my last post, there is no smoothing at all, but as I said, they look almost the same as 1/48. I did it just to humor William, obviously he's aware of that..

I would normally use 1/12 and 1/24 when I want to make some manual adjustments to improve further when I feel Audyssey has done its best. Since the results seem very good already, I have not tried hard to find the time to do any manual tweaking so far. Just fyi, I was too crazy and lazy to get rid of my 3 lesser subs, and I ignored SVS's recommendation to use identical subs. The graphs you see are for 7 channel stereo mode plus 5 subs in total, 2 Energy Veritas and 1 Polk audio for the surrounds, and a PCU12 and PB13U for the L/R.

 

[PENG]

Of relevance:
http://www.audioholics.com/loudspeaker-design/audio-measurements

I read that article too long ago. So yeah I know about those tricks, but thanks anyway and I'll read it again.

 

[PENG]

Similar scale/smoothing to yours, with phase. I have not look into the phase side of things yet, any tips for me to save me time when I am ready to do manual tweaking?

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

Peng- thanks for that!

The warrior- Question. Why are you rising from 20hz and up? Sorry if I'm speaking out of turn, but if you're going for a house curve, you'll want to rise from 200 down to 20. If you're going for something else, I'll just stay tuned, and stay out!