Arcam vs. B&K

guys, thank you all for your replies. It really helps!

I don't really cared about any video processing in a receiver either. Like Ckoffend said, it's just one more step for the signals to travel through and very possibly got degraded in the process. I will just connect all my video outputs to the monitor, be it a TV or a projecter. I am also not very sure what HDMI's benefit will be in this time. The standard is just unconvincing even with the 1.3 version.

And one more question, what's the difference between B&K 507 S1 and S2? Is this only a software upgrade or is there any hardware upgrade as well? I just couldn't find any info on their website.

Thank you all again!

Fans, give a ring to a B&K dealer and ask them what the difference is. Tell 'em you have a S1 and a friend with an S2 and by listening you can't tell any difference but wanted to know if an upgrade is likely in your purchasing future. I believe the differences are minimal.

By the way, since our back and forth yesterday, I remember seeing an S1 being advertised somewhere for about $1400. I think it was even a dealer demo. BOL

Ckoffend, thank you for all the responses. You are very kind. I will probably go with a 507 S2 since someone is offering it for $1929(just within my budget) on eBay, plus shipping. Shipping is a big cost factor for me because of where I live. I'm praying for a smooth transaction since this is really the first time I am buying online.

A couple of the big differences between the S1 and the S2 is that the S2 has 3 notch filters (for setting up room calibration) where the S1 only has 1. Also, the S1 did not do a very good job of describing how to set up these filters. But pretty much, you find frequencies in your room that are overexagerated (I used a simple SPL meter and plotted the output of every frequency in Excel to see where the peaks were. Then you just find the peaks, and set up the notch filters to cancel out these peaks (same frequency range, opposite signal peak). And I believe these can be set to bring up frequencies that are deficient in you setup as well.

The other upgrade you probably won't care about because it has to do with transcoding any imput to component video. It does not "up-convert" because there is no processing in the resolution, it just sends the video signal out over the component video jacks.

Also the remote ROCKS!!

Hope this helps.

Turk,

Thank you so much for your detailed explanation. It really helps.