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Anthem: Doing the HT / 2 Channel Tango

I’ve been the happy owner of a Luxman 507ux fed by a Mytek Brooklyn for about 2 years. Extremely happy with the 2 channel performance, especially with Roon as the source.

For about the same time I’ve created kind of a hybrid system. An Anthem AVM 50 processor feeding 3 IcePower monoblocks, and a subwoofer, with L/R going to the Luxman, and a miniDSP doing room correction somewhere in there.

I finally bit the bullet today and purchased an Anthem MRX 540. I’m always leery of new HT equipment because a lot of highly rated stuff sounds like crap to me. I’ve spent a lot of money on Emotiva and Onkyo solutions which just sucked. My significantly older Theta Casanova easily spanked all of them. The AVM 50 was at least OK, but the MRX 540 is a lot better sounding, even as a preamp.

It’s not a home run. I can’t get the Audio Return Channel to work, and the lack of Roon support means it’s useless as a streamer for me, but still I have to say I’m really happy with the overall sound quality, and this is before any calibration has happened.

In particular it's the background detail, the ambient sound queues feel like they are filling the room a lot better than the AVM 50.

Over the next week or two I’ll set up the subwoofer, and run the ARC to see if I like the choices it makes with minimal intervention.

erik_squires

Showing 1 response by eyecatcher127

eyecatcher127
4 posts
 

I always found arc sounded better off but not sure on the new generation. It will probably depend on your system and room. The trick I found is to restrict the amount of boost and find the natual room gain of your speakers and room so that there is less of a delta. It is always better to cut than to boost. Genesis usually gets it pretty close but you may have to tweak the speaker levels when you get more practice. Taking more measurements and varing the height of the microphone also help. You can go up to 10 positions. I usually don't see many people using the tilt but it was refreshing to see someone else that uses it also. It is usually done to track the natural roll offf of your speaker rather than boosting it flat. YMMV.

These settings will give you a good house curve similar to a harman curve

Room Gain: 2.0 dB
Room Gain Center Frequency: 200 Hz
Deep Bass Boost: 3.0 dB
Deep Bass Boost Center Frequency: 50 Hz
Tilt Level: -2 dB
Tilt Start Frequency: 1000 Hz

Then setup a few other profiles like this an then try limiting Maximum Correction Frequency: 350 Hz Or changing Deep Bass Boost Center Frequency to 80hz or removing the tilt

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