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

erik_squires

Showing 5 responses by erik_squires

@deep_333 FYI, I spent years in the motion picture audio industry. :)

The thing the Anthem does really well is set relative distances and levels.  The EQ sucked and was not fixable. :)

An interesting topic is brought up above, which is what all the extra speakers are for. Are they for effects or immersion?  This argument was compeltely dominated by Dolby in the days of Dolby Surround (i.e. ProLogic for the home buyers).

Dolby Surround was 100% aimed at effects. Wow factor. The internal steering mechanism prevented mixing engineers from even attempting subtle immersive audio environments. They encouraged fly over type of effects, oddly sometimes always going in one direction. Alternative decoders IMHO may do a better job for that 2-channel multiplexed era of movie experience.

Today in the era of discrete channels and now even object based audio encoding this capability has finally been wrested from the electrical engineers and put back into the hands of the mixing engineers where it belongs.

That is not to say movies are better mixed, they are not always, but I think the chance of having spectacular audio environments has certainly come a long way.

To be clear, I would sum up my complaints in two issues:

  • Immersiveness
  • Bass response

Listening to well mixed DVDs I don’t feel surrounded by the environment. I feel subjected to it. The bass also doesn’t feel well integrated with the rest of the system. I can hear all 5 main speakers, but I don’t feel surrounded. The front channels never fully merge into 1 audio presentation, and the rear speakers also feel separated from the fronts.

In my experience, this is something you can do with 5 speakers alone, you don’t need Atmos to get to this level of performance. Just good speakers, a good room and careful EQ.  An approach at least a little validated by Floyd Toole's writing on "room correction." 

My personal approach to EQ is very different from Anthem. Anthem picks an ideal curve and tries to get all speakers to match it. I used my mains as the reference and made the 3 remaining speakers match them. I also set the bass to go down to 16 Hz and descend about 1.25 dB/octave.

Another way in which my approach differs from Anthem is that I only use 1 measurement point. Trying to set all 5 speakers to an ideal curve, across multiple measurement points may be correct on average and exactly wrong where I listen.

Lastly, when I do EQ I do so sparingly, attempting to use the least amount of filters and least amount of correction as possible, giving myself more freedom in the bass to fix room modes than in the mid to treble.

For all these reasons I want to try a Marantz HD processor next. The advanced Audyssey levels let you craft your DSP curves completely by hand.

Hi @esthlos13 - Unfortunately I have not. Maybe I should solicit processors to review? :)

I may suffer from NIH (not invented here) syndrome when it comes to room integration. I really liked the setup I had when I was using hand crafted curves via miniDSP, so I could be that guy who is only satisfied when he makes it himself. :)

OTOH, I had really high hopes for ATC to simplify the amount of gear and cables I needed to have not to mention the time and effort needed for calibration.  At least with Anthem, I was not at all impressed.

Hey Kota, no. As I mentioned, I really don’t have time to do much of a write up. I just didn’t like the results. Compared to nothing, they deadened the sound. Compared to my hand tuned EQ, they never managed to create a coherent sound stage.

I’m afraid I have other things which take up my time and attention. All I can do is just say I’m not impressed. Further, I can see why listeners would be so enamoured of Atmos if Dolby Digital and DTS only got to this level of performance. Hoenstly, prior to Atmos, DD and DTS were really amazing. This is not even close to the best I have heard in my living room.

Also, I think the mic is kind of crap int he upper octaves, so while I don’t have the time to post anything, I would not be using the Anthem measurements as a way of understanding how well it works. It needs third party validation.

In particular, as someone who has actually installed and worked on the electronics for actual theaters, I'm really not impressed with multi point microphone techniques for small listening spaces.  There was a blog  post by the president of Bryston on this and I think he was more or less accurate that it doesn't work nearly as well in a home.