The end goal is to be sitting enveloped in a seamless dome of sound with no individual speaker even being remotely localizable. If one doesn’t have the room for it, he doesn’t and that's about it. There are many tools in object based audio prepros to get you only so far...They can’t fix a chaos room.
Anthem ARC - Well, it's not that great.
Hi Everyone,
I don’t have the time and energy to do a full write up with frequency plots and the like, but I want to say that after pushing Anthem HT processors for a while, I lived with the MRX 540 and it’s ARC and honestly it doesn’t sound good.
Sucks the dynamics out of the soundtracks and at the same time fails to improve the speaker to speaker matching. In other words, you don’t end up with an immersive sound field.
I’m so sad and disappointed. As you know, I am a big proponent of using EQ and DSP correctly to enhance all listening. I’m just sad that the automatic part of the Anthem Room Correction is just not very good. I suspect some of this may be the forced multi-point measurements that work much better in large auditoriums than in my modest listening room and couch.
I’m keeping the receiver but going back to using my own EQ curves, something impossible to do in the Anthem.
Best,
Erik
Showing 2 responses by deep_333
@erik_squires , The primary goal of the processor’s auto-cal is to set the distances/levels for speakers, subs, deploy any RSC filters correctly as it sees fit, etc. You will need to make manual fine refinements to distances/levels further from the ballpark it set it to. The software’s goofy output for auto-eq is for an entry-level user. EQ will need to done manually for the hifi ear. He will go to town with it & adjust to taste as it works for his ears. Yamaha permits a full manual adjustment for multi-band PEQ. Sound United - Denon/Marantz used to provide full manual GEQ control (not sure if they’ve moved up to PEQ yet), etc.....Not sure why Anthem wouldn’t permit that?! I don’t know, i’ve never had an Anthem product. When you’re taking a multi-point measurement with your cal mic, focus on the primary sweetspot and don’t deviate any additional mic locations from within a foot of the primary sweet spot. Moving the mic around over a larger span (compromising the main sweet spot) may be acceptable to HT guys for movies. If music is the goal, keep it around the primary sweet spot for you. Any other spots can be deemed mother-in-law spots and are not required to sound fabulous. Ensure that the bedlayer surround speakers are physically at the same distance as the fronts. One can’t keep em 2 ft away from the ears because the room’s the size of a closet and hope the magic delays will fix everything. If your 5 bedlayer speakers hit low and fall in the hi-fi category, sub positions are sub-optimal, etc, run bedlayer speakers full range (don’t bass-manage/high pass) and dovetail/blend the subs in. Some brands have terrible implementations of bass management. This is all done very well in some brands and not others. It takes a lot of patience, research, focused thought, comprehension, listening, multiple trials and effort to get to a high fidelity multichannel rig (it isn’t as simple as stereo). If not, everyone would have done it by now.
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