Originally posted by: kalrith
Originally posted by: jtvang125
**Edit: I went ahead and ordered the AVR-2310CI (better upscaler than the AVR-998) and Infinity PS-12.
Let us know how it sounds when you get these. I have a similar system to yours and would like to eventually upgrade the receiver and sub. I really like the Denon receivers, especially given the price drop of the current line up and the Audyssey features.
Edit: I'm especially curious as to whether a receiver upgrade provides a noticeable improvement in the sound of the Polk speakers.
Over the last week or so I've been trying to figure out wtf was wrong with the Audyssey MultiEQXT on my Onkyo 876. After I moved to this new place, I tried running Audyssey again and the resulting calibration resulted in extremely low subwoofer levels.
After doing several Audyssey calibrations with one sub or both my subs hooked up, I thought I had a major problem. I reset the receiver with the advice of Onkyo tech support and that fixed all my issues.
Audyssey is a truly amazing piece of technology. Now that I've spend a lot of time going back and forth testing No EQ vs. Audyssey MultiEQ XT and Audyssey MultiEQ XT + Dynamic Volume, I know the huge difference in sound quality it can provide.
My room still has issues with some major acoustic problems that I'll be attempting to correct with a lot of room treatments (complete with a thread about my plans and progress), but Audyssey has gone a long way toward improving the situation.
To check if Audyssey was working after the reset, I hooked up a pair of $60 Sony bookshelf speakers from my girlfriend.
The difference Audyssey made was nothing short of incredible. It was so improved that I even tried to capture the improvement with my crappy camera and I think it probably picked up 25% of the actual improvement of real life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmmDenKL4U0
Notes:
The 20" monitor at the bottom lets you see when I'm switching from No EQ to Audyssey.
(Black screen = Audyssey, White text screen = No EQ)
The audio recording is mono, so any differences that require stereo to detect are not going to be heard in the video.
I think the biggest difference was soundstage width.
Second improvement was a much improved frequency response.
Everything sounded so much cleaner and balanced with Audyssey enabled.
Here's what it did with the Sony speakers
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Y...owsDAjello/SonyAll.png
With my main speakers, I still noticed an improvement, but it wasn't a jaw dropping improvement that it did with the $60 speakers.
It made the crappy $60 speakers sound really good.
It made really good sounding speakers sound great.
Here's what it did with my main speakers + one of my subs hooked up
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Y...Ajello/RS850SVSAll.png
There are still some issues with this room that I'm hoping my room treatment project will help out.
Note that the results of these plots above 3kHz should be taken with a bag of salt since the RS meter I'm using cannot be trusted to reflect reality.
The last two days have been a very useful experience for me. Tiamat, who has more experience with room tweaking and running frequency sweeps, was a great resource for me when I was trying to diagnose my Audyssey issues. Especially after hearing the difference in results on those Sony speakers, I am an even more firm believer in automatic room correction, and especially Audyssey.
My only other experience with automatic room correction was one of the first consumer level implementations, MCACC on my old Pioneer 1014tx. That was nowhere near as sophisticated or effective as Audyssey MultiEQ XT. I couldn't even get repeatable results with that early generation of MCACC.
I am sure the MCACC has made vast improvements over the years as well as the other room correction options from other manufacturers (like Yamaha). I am extremely pleased with the difference Audyssey has made.
It has taken my system up a notch, and up SEVERAL notches when I was using inexpensive speakers. I believe the worse your room issues and the worse your speaker's performance, the more of an improvement Audyssey will make.
Naturally, this is not going to be a panacea to all your audio issues though. You still need to place speakers well in your room to get the most benefit. Audyssey can correct some problems, but if you have big room nulls, that's not something Audyssey can effectively deal with. As Tiamat suggested to me, try to get things the best you can with just placement of your system first. After that, Audyssey will attempt to improve upon those things that you were unable to fix on your own.
In my new place, I have some major echo problems between two parallel walls on the left and right of my room. This is a significant issue that is still there with Audyssey (as I suspected it would be). I'll have some further updates in a future thread once I get my room treatments up, but Audyssey gets a big :thumbsup: from me as one of the biggest upgrades I've done to my system so far.
EDIT:
Oh, any my gf also heard a massive difference as well. I don't think I have golden ears at all, and although she was part of AV club in HS and such, I don't think either of us qualify as "audiophiles". This is one of those real and massive differences that anyone should be able to hear, not the "I replaced my 14 gauge speakers wire with 12 gauge speaker wire" type upgrades. After listening for a couple minutes, my gf asked "can you have these on Audyssey when they're back in the other room too?".
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