Audyssey Room Correction Performance Tips for Your Denon/Marantz Receiver

Alright my friends, we are live again. Three live broadcasts in one week. One of the channels takes you there. Audioholics takes you there. How are you doing, Teo, how are you, my friend Gene, is it going great? I can't think of a better way to spend. on a Sunday night to be with you and talk about a topic that we have been discussing for the last few weeks and that is odyssey and how most people, especially our enthusiasts, who own a denim or a

marantz

avr and have raced odyssey , they're probably not They're not getting the most out of their equipment, yeah, you know, as you know, I've been a big Denon fan since you know, basically, since I started audioholics in the '90s.

In fact, I tried the first Odyssey product I had on the Denon AVR. 5805 was the first version of the Odyssey and back then they had the little hockey puck microphone, so it didn't even have, as you know, it wasn't like that thin Eiffel tower microphone that they have now and then. when they released the 5805 it didn't even do anything to the subwoofer channel, I measured it and remembered that I pissed off a lot of people on Odyssey and Denim because the implementation wasn't right so they had to go. Go back to the drawing board and make a firmware change uh on the first

receiver

with odyssey because you did something for the subwoofer channel so there's a big story there a few years later when they released the odyssey standalone box. it was an eight channel it was actually a very good product it was a very sophisticated eight channel dsp box and I had the former technical director chris kiryakis another greek yes the greeks yes so I had it in my house and that's when I started playing with multi-sub and how to do it better in Odyssey and at that time I came to the conclusion that the best way to run subwoofer management calibration or auto eq is to first correct the delays and levels and obviously the position of the subs, then you run a global EQ for all the subs if they are set correctly and as a result of that, the latest version of Odyssey now does exactly that, so if you have a new Marantz or a new Denon

receiver

, it will check the delay, the ti and the levels of each sub before applying that global EQ to both subs simultaneously and you know, we've been talking about this for many years, how global EQ is really the right way to do it and I think there's a misnomer that it What you want to do is make each subplane and that's not really going to give you the best base

performance

on

your

main seat or if you're trying to EQ on a range. of seating, the wrong way to do it, yes, I'm just talking about a summary of the benefits of multi-sub and I see many put it this way.

Now I do about five consultations a week. um from people who want me to help them get their system sound better or you know, perform better and I always see people putting a subwoofer on either side of the center channel and I think it's not really a multiple subwoofer, but basically a big subwoofer. to achieve a uniform base distribution.

room

-wide layout, you really need to put the subwoofers in the right locations in the

room

and they usually don't line up correctly on the front wall, you know, three feet apart, and the good thing is we're going to talk of all that in a little bit and give everyone a refresher because you know, if we look back, the odyssey began, what was it around 2002?

You know, it's amazing where we've come with this technology. I remember talking about the Greeks I ran into. visit uh michael k michael k or michael carcadelis was the owner of lyric audio in manhattan and by chance I visited him once out of the blue and we found out that we are from the same town in Greece as our family so they really hit it off and Mike took me to the back room and those of you who have been to hifi stores know there is a back room and that's where the best audio equipment is and I can't remember which one it was, maybe 20 years ago and it was the first time I really understood the important role that the room plays.

I remember that listening session. It was the most vivid listening session I've ever had and I still remember that they were a couple of Nola's grandchildren. it was audio research uh pre uh you know amplification, but when you hear audiophiles talk about creating a window, the room was incredible, they spent a million dollars on that room, it's physically isolated from the rest of the subway building , had a waveguide acoustic on the ceiling, if I remember correctly, carpet, everything was designed to perfection and the problem becomes as big as it sounds when you demo the equipment there, when you bring it home you have the reality about what

your

room will be like and all those problems.

Oh yeah, well eq has done a great job, if you just use everything, especially Odyssey, at their defaults, you probably still won't get the best

performance

and will possibly introduce some additional problems and try to figure out why your speakers aren't playing. as they should, yes, and the only thing I want to bring to you is to bring more awareness. I've heard dealers in the past say that you know you don't need to worry about room acoustics or do any treatment in your room because you have an automatic equalizer that will take care of all that, that's never the case, okay, the equalizer Automatic EQ is not a substitute for getting your room acoustics right first, it's like eating a good cake and then putting some frosting on it if you don't have a good base, you won't get any benefit from automatic EQ, so I want to make sure that people realize that the first thing we recommend is to get the acoustics of your room adequate, such as that glass door. behind me, that's not good, this room doesn't sound good the way it is now and I'm going to fix that.

I just want people to realize that there are things you can do even if you can't afford to put room treatments in your room or in the room. My wife doesn't like to see those things. We're doing a weekly broadcast with Anthony Gramani about room acoustics and we're going to delve into deeper topics there, but there are things you can do naturally to fix your room acoustics and get that sound. the best you can and when you're going to apply Room Eq it works much more effectively when you first get the acoustics of your room right and you get the position of your speakers and your listening area, you first have to optimize all of that exactly exactly and even if you look at the docs from Odyssey or any room

correction

document, they always indicate that you want to make the right settings and what we'll talk about a little bit is how important it is to play in the room and you know how to do it with some music that really starts with some fundamental bass because getting the bass right is where you need to start when placing your speakers and once you have the base dialed in, you can tweak and adjust the placement for the midrange. uh on the high end yeah so I'm going to share your screen so you can uh I appreciate you putting together this slideshow that always helps to have nice cool illustrations so why don't we turn it over here so that ?

Today we're going to talk about a very practical session on how to configure and optimize Odyssey, so when we talk about Odyssey, at least as far as modern Avrs and pre-pros go, we're actually talking about Denon and Moran, so It's really the sound. united brands that have kept up the odyssey and as we were talking, I can't emphasize enough, start with the basics, don't just get a great setup, great speakers, bang them against the wall in the corners and then say, "Oh, I'm going to run". odyssey is going to fix everything no that's not going to give you great sound it always starts with proper speaker placement and a good tip and trick is to play in the room and what you want to do when you play in the room is at least start I do it with two channel music and really start placing the speakers like we were saying, where the bass will sound great.

There are a couple of tracks that I really like to use, plus some of the classics that you hear. The Holly Cole moment was a great start with her, I can see it clearly now, uh, cover and train, two really classic songs that have nice clean tight bass, and here it's about the quality of the bass, if you want, then go to Sunday's Soldier of Love. really great dynamics, solid bass and then if you want something that really gives you more of that deep deep subsonic foundation that shakes the room, bonnie mckee's problem is fabulous of course lords royals and you may not have heard of katie maluis, but the ships that sail from the sky are different. great track to test the base and I always like to laugh at the trolls movie soundtrack, hair up, turn it up and it will be a great way to test some bass in your system, but the point here is to make your room As important a part of your audio system as it is of your equipment, you can have mediocre speakers, place them right in a room with great sound and they could outperform much more expensive speakers that are not properly placed in a room with poor sound, so you should start.

Firstly, with speaker placement, don't cut it, otherwise anything you try to do with Odyssey or any other room

correction

won't give you the results and potential that is there. You know it's fun to stick with your original material, um. Years ago, when Shane Rich from rbh sound came to my house to install it, I think maybe it was the T-30s or something like two generations of flagships ago, he introduced me to an artist named Diana Reeves. I don't know if you ever listened. There's a CD from her called Never To Far, I'm sure we played it because, as we know, Shane is the nicest guy on the planet, he is, he beat you to the knife, he did it, you're never going to live. that and when he came out, he also introduced me to something else.

We were testing the rbh svtr tower speakers I have here. I love amazing speakers and, uh, it was really Aaron Copland's fanfare for the common man by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra. I mean, you want to talk about something with dynamics and bass again, a great track, so anyway, Shane, like you were saying, introduced me to this Diana Reeves track and I uploaded it to my Yamaha Music Cast system, the old system that It actually has a hard drive. And when I came back before I moved into this new house, I was looking at my hard drive just to see the common songs that I was listening to and that thing was like I think I listened to that track number two like 3,500 times. for the last six years because I'm very familiar with bass and you know it's like you get tired of a song to a certain point but at the end of the day I always try to get it done and it's critical to make your main speakers and your subs sound good together if you get that, that's 90 right there, so you need to use something that you're really familiar with based on, obviously, the measurements, of course, but the listening tests, you know if you can't do all the measurements.

You should at least know what the bass should sound like with something you are very familiar with and want to take it to the next level of bass performance, the key really goes to multiple subs, yes we have talked about this many times. times, but this is very important, a single sub simply will not give you optimal footing in a room, it is simply not within the laws of someone who is not from a very narrow listening area, yeah, right, so what I did? Here I took some excerpts from one of your articles from a couple of years ago and I thought it was important because what it really does is highlight what science teaches us about subwoofer placement, so if you are making two or four subwoofers, then I'm going to talk about multi-sub here, science says that in an average rectangular room, you place the subwoofers in the four corners of the room or at the midpoints of the room, so the placement of the subwoofers in both the corners like in the middle of the wall will help solve this problem. room modes and the other one that I do here in my setup is the one-quarter and three-quarter subwoofer placement, so you go from the left or right wall and then the back and do a quarter in and three-quarter or a quarter from each side. and conversely, that also works on the left and right sidewalls, so these are proven locations for multiple subs that will give you the best base performance which will then help a system like an Odyssey perform better when you're looking for EQ and as you said, no.

I'll add to that if you go back to the diagram above years ago, when Todd Welty was doing all the simulations on the various subwoofer positions, even though everyone was doing four secondary locations on the middle wall and I set up systems like that and yeah, like that way you get the best c2c consistency, but you don't get the best low frequency coupling factor, so if you could put them all in the corners, if you realize now, if you go to any of the trade shows like I was at cedia when jbl did their synthesis demo, they put two subs in each corner, so they had two four six eight subwoofersand they did all four corners and that's because with a good equalizer, first of all, you get a reasonably good seat to see the consistency, so the equalizer works. in all listening areas, but below 30 hertz, those four corner subs act like a giant super sub in their low frequency coupling factor, you don't get as much efficiency when you do the middle four walls, so if you're going to do two subs.

Middle walls are fine, like the front and back, but generally speaking, if you're going to do four in a rectangular room, if you could do the corners, you could even put them in the side corners so you can put them in a wall that you already know. I could put them on the roof. There are many different options. I just wanted to add that and jeans. If you stick them in the corners you'll also get up to a three db boost in the low frequencies to get that boost that if you're putting it on a half wall or quarter wall you won't necessarily get and then you could compensate for any anomalies that may result from the corner location.

Actually, yes you get something like that for every surface, if it's infinitely long, which it's not, you actually get up to 6 db, so you know the corner loading would actually give you an extra up to 6 db, but yes, you are right. You definitely get more oomph when you put them on a wall in the corners, so for base junkies, that's a good tip to use, so as you mentioned and I quoted you here, it's important that the overall EQ, even on systems like Odyssey, you can't. change the variations from seat to seat what we have to do is use multi-sub so that's the point so when we look at odyssey okay and we set up multi-subs odyssey uses what it calls a home theater sub eq and what it does.

You'll notice this when you first start Odyssey, so we're starting to get into the more practical elements. Now Odyssey will automatically adjust the level and then the delay for each subs. It does it independently first and then what you'll notice is for each one. The multi eq xt32 post metering is applied to all the subs together as a sum, so yes, I have the Denon uh 8500h. So when you have a situation, you might wonder if it's important to EQ all the subs and you already know this avr. or this prepro only has two sub outputs, okay, just use a Y adapter, use a Y adapter and that way you just match, for example, the front and rear subs and then again they match as a sum, for which is not so big. of a deal and I know there's been some ways that people know I need four six eight subwoofer outputs that you don't need as long as you do it it works fine and in my setup what I have Gen done we've talked about I've had svs subs on the back wall, I've had the rbh on the front wall and then been able to EQ all the subs just using the Y adapter, so that's the way. to do that and add to that, if you're worried about only having two sub outputs with four subwoofers, try grouping each pair with path differences equal to the listening area, so if you only have two delays, make sure that when you put two subs on one output that are equidistant from the listening area, which usually works best when you're trying to sum together and gene, we were talking about this before, so if someone is listening and says well, just tell me what.

To really make it easy is if you have the stubs in the front, they will probably be on the same phase, same as the subs in the back of the room, so it makes sense to pair, say, the sub one output with the sub that's in the front and the sub output two to the subs in the back yeah I agree okay so now let's move on to the odyssey multi-eq editing app so from now on , every time someone talks about odyssey you have to spend an extra twenty dollars after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on your avr, make the 1999 investment because you can't, you can't get the most out of odyssey without the multi editor app -eq, stop, so don't run it through the avr, do it yourself. a favor and buy the app, let's go a little deeper into that, why it's so important, so everything we're going to talk about from now on has to do with the multi-eq editing app, forget what there is in the avr and I want to add to the fact that if you use the multi cue editing app you better have like an ipad or some type of touch screen device that is bigger than your phone because if you try to do any type of accuracy in terms of changing the response or the shape of the equalizer in which the curves come out is very difficult to do with a phone, unfortunately the app is not the best app in the world and that is why it has a 3 out of 5 stars pointing it out on this moment, it works much better with a big screen like an iPad, okay, and I've run it on both, so I can absolutely tell you that's the case, you can get a lot more detail at the frequencies that you want to achieve with an ipad, so So before we start, we talked about how important location is.

I love using a laser tape measure. I have my Bosch every time I install speakers in my room. I always measure my distances. with a laser tape, if you don't have a laser tape and want to use the string method, make sure you don't use a nylon string that stretches a little, but it is very important that the speakers are especially set up equidistant. your foreheads, the second thing is to throw away that horrible cardboard stand, okay that's so bad, I have that thing unboxed, it's just terrible, make a 25 investment, go to the local music store or go online and get a microphone stand with articulated arm or tripod. use a microphone stand with a boom arm and that makes calibration much easier and you'll get a little more accuracy too.

One way to do this is clearly to just move the microphone stand, what I've done is a bit a bit different so I've created my own Odyssey measurement tool, so it's very simple and rudimentary. I just took a piece of wood and I have a couple of these in different dimensions. I have one that's shaped like an , I have everything dialed in and most importantly I am keeping all my measurements within the 20 inches from the main listening point that Odyssey recommends and actually requires. I don't know if anyone understands that you're not supposed to do any of your measurements anymore. more than 20 inches from the main listening point and they said 20, I thought it was two feet, um 24 is correct, I absolutely do not recommend going to 24.

And the reasons why I want to say, this is me, so I'm glad that you mentioned that gene. as a personal preference, it's because you know that not all speakers perform well off-axis and the more access you have outside of that main listening point, we'll start to get some measurements that may or may not show some of that access off-axis. of poor place. I don't recommend the performance that other speakers will have and you shouldn't. We will talk about this. Do eight measurements at the main listening point, that's really bad, but I recommend between 20 and 18 inches, that's what I found works really well.

For me, in my setup, you know, it's funny when every once in a while I walk into a room at Best Buy the Magnolia and I just want you to know that I'm not there to troll, I just want to see what people know, that the people who tell you They're selling the equipment and I got into it with this guy who was demoing a Marantz receiver and he was telling me how great the Odyssey is. I was like, oh, that's great, right, and he says, yeah, you know what's great about this room, corrections. You could put the microphone anywhere in the room, you could just put it up, put it next to your seat, put it anywhere and I'm like, geez, that doesn't really sound like it could work that way, but if they're like that, this is what they do.

I'm telling people to just put the microphone anywhere, no it doesn't work that way, the system must have data relative to the main listening area for it to do anything worthwhile exactly and you don't want to know what That's what's interesting. I heard someone for the first time say what I didn't realize is that if you look at the graph that the odyssey eq app shows you, it actually shows the uh measurements for being on the floor in front of the listening position and behind which It's there so you can. I know a beginner can make a genuine mistake, but we're talking about it having to be at ear level, no more than 20 inches from the main listening point, that's my recommendation on that, so it's a personal thing. , the second you want, we will get it. to know why you need it, this is an SPL meter, it can be analog, the old radio shack style, I still have mine, there are so many apps available now to make it easier, so there are a couple of free apps.

Just go to your app store and search for SPL meter and then there are some paid ones, if you are really serious about what you are doing there are a great set of paid tools like audio tools that give you a lot of sets of additional tools like rta fft etc. plus a spl. So gen, that's why we're here, how to perform and perfect your Odyssey measurements, so we have about 10 steps, so here's step by step number one, obviously, you need to be quiet, as quiet as possible. so that Odyssey compensates if he listens. sounds during calibration, I know this sometimes confuses some enthusiasts because then they'll be like, oh my god, this channel here is out of control because every time you do a sweep, one channel gets louder, this is what happens if The audio is strange, if Odyssey detects a loud sound during a measurement, what it will do is remeasure that speaker and increase the volume of that speaker.

That's normal, there's nothing to worry about and what it will do next is every two subsequent sweeps so that one speaker is noticeably noticeable. louder will not increase the final volume of that speaker, it is simply detecting some noise and raising the test tone to try to compensate for it, so that is a very important point, the second step is to measure the level of the year, so here There's my little tool that I have. my boom mic and then let's start that and say sitting ear level position sitting platforms very good sitting ear level position so the first measurement should be in that main position when sitting now I have home theater seats and If you're in an environment where the two of you have quick home theater seating, put on some music, put your head back on the backrest, and then move your head forward, you'll notice a tonal shift, so your seat will affect the measurements. , so if you have the ability to recline the chair recline the chair, otherwise you will have to move the microphone forward to get an accurate measurement again, in my opinion, no more than 20 inches from the main listening position and Try to measure each position equally. some people will tell you it's wrong, well that's just me.

I'm going to do all eight measurements in the same position, which totally defeats the purpose of what Odyssey is trying to do, so that's step two, are we okay with that gene? I want to add, yeah, I think we're good, definitely, definitely recline your seats, I do it anyway, when I just do any room measurements, I keep the surface of that seat away from the microphone and now we're getting into some of the stuff. well the subwoofer levels will keep you coming back so there were some comments in the chat while everyone was waiting to go live so here is the answer to the question yes if you have calibrated your subwoofers to 75 db and start the odyssey. it will tell you that your subs are too loud, then you will have to dial the sub volume again to get into that green area, only then can you continue with the calibration, yes, it will not allow you to continue if it gets too loud, no, not at all , so you're stuck, so don't worry, we have a solution for that and we're going to get into this, but what I like to do and gene, you and I were talking about this, Okay, I try to set it up and you try set it to that top green area so it's just below the red and that's where you and I like to start our calibration right now.

The next step is the phase. This is really good. The thing about Odyssey is that it will measure phase in addition, so generally speaking, as long as you've been very careful in correctly connecting the positive and negative terminals between the avr and the speaker, you'll be fine. You won't have it if you don't do it. i have a reverse connection everything will record fine but there is an anomaly so i also own the svs ultra towers and when i had some

denon

and moran avrs to review i moved the speakers and ran odyssey sometimes i get an error phase in one of the two speakerstimes both and this is what's happening here um eugene you and I talked about three way speakers and speakers that have opposing woofers they can sometimes generate false phase errors so what I've noticed on the svs ultra towers are The closer they are to the left or right boundary of a room, the more likely they are to produce a false phase error, so the key thing here is to check the wiring, if you have it correct, ignore the phase error and move on. so also another reason that could trigger a phase error is um so i don't know if the svs do this or not because i didn't check the ultra tower but there are many three way speakers that put the tweeter out of phase with the rest of the driver so that they have electrical phases out of phase so that they can get the proper acoustic sum and when you do that with these room equalization systems, they automatically trigger an error in the phase, so it's a very distinct possibility that it could be a deliberate design choice on the part of the manufacturer that is causing a false phase error, agreed, agreed and then after running Odyssey it has done a successful calibration check, the results don't just assume that Odyssey has done everything correctly I mean.

Gene, you and I haven't talked about this, but there have been a few cases where I've finished an odyssey calibration and it's been significantly off with some speakers due to who knows what anomaly, so always double check your measurement, so here, from the main listening position, my left. and the rbhs are 8.9 feet away, that's correct, so never rely on auto equalizer based management in Odyssey, this is very very important, Odyssey will tend to assign small to large speakers when they are close to a limit , there is nothing wrong with a speaker being rated small, it doesn't mean you have a bad speaker, that's how all this is measured and gen, why don't you talk about this next? point because we had a long conversation about your recommendation, I was talking about dock management, yeah, just setting all the speakers to small, yeah, I mean, I'd say 95 of the people watching this right now, there's a couple of base bosses out there who probably use really big speakers like you and me, but 95 of the people should have all the small speaker sets, do it with a crossover at 80 hertz, it just works better, it's easier to set up, It's very difficult to get full range towers and it's very difficult to get full range towers that have the same type of base output as a dedicated subwoofer, okay, and this is one area where I really want to make sure that no one freaks out, so in this particular measurement, my sub 1 and my sub 2 are 8 feet 9 inches. away because the svtr tower has the submodule directly below the monitor module, at the same distance, well why then is the Odyssey 22.4 feet and 22.1?

The answer to that question is that you are looking at all the delays that have to happen for processing on the subwoofer side. life outside, so it's compensating for that now there are different schools of thought on this gene that you and I have talked about, let's say in my case it would be totally appropriate to put these subs at 8.9 feet, but the key thing to remove is both time. since the subs are larger than the distance they actually are, that's fine, but if Odyssey measures the distance of your subwoofer less than they actually are, you have a problem, so you need to do it manually or consider redoing your measurements from scratch.

I don't know what your deeper perspective is, I mean, you could just hit the 180 degree phase cycle, you know, or the 360 ​​degree phase cycle. It's really hard to determine that I've had strange results with Odyssey, sometimes it gets the phase setting perfect and I guess I didn't expect it to be that distance, but then I go into traction measurements with rew and sure enough Odyssey is right, other times it's right. totally ruins it and in fact you have some graphs from one of my reviews i think it's from the sr 8012 where i ran odyssey and the base calibration looked really bad until i adjusted the phase delay or subwoofer delays and all of a sudden my base really had great integration, better with odyssey on than off and we'll talk more about that later so I guess my advice to you is trust the face or trust the delay settings but listen a little bit if you can't make measurements and then you might have to adjust that a little bit, okay and generate it. and I'm of the same opinion, we prefer to turn off the dynamic EQ and other automatic levels, so if you like precision, turn off all that extra stuff and I'll notice it a little later in presence, yeah, and you know what's funny .

It's um, I think I normally turn it off, the only time I would leave it on is if I'm listening at low levels and I just need a little bit of a bass boost, you know, I don't want to throw people out of the room, um, but when I was looking at your slideshow, I thought to myself that since Dan and Marantz implemented multi-sub for Odyssey and it has that little level where it tells you to set it to 75, we both noticed that it sets it to about four. or five db too low, well I think it's because they now have a dynamic EQ and they're trying to compensate for the extra headroom that they're going to need because the dynamic EQ, if you look at my measurements, you can increase the sub levels roughly. 10 db so I think they're compensating for that somewhat by having you set your secondary levels by default too low and you know maybe it's a good time to say right now if you stop at step five you'll have done everything automatically. turn on the music turn on a movie you're going to be what happened to the bass the bass has been totally sucked out of my system something's wrong so let's get there wait a second this is something that drove me crazy oh yeah I just went crazy , so before the Odyssey app, I think rightly so, I thought Odyssey was terrible for music, I hated it, I didn't like it at all and I come to find out what Odyssey does, it applies this thing called midrange compensation, like this that if you're using Odyssey inside the avr you can't turn off this right gene, you're stuck with this, you know, I think if you use the flat setting, it turns off the two kilohertz.

I could be wrong on that, but I know for a fact that you can definitely turn it off in the editor app, the editor exactly, and that's why we say that if you're going to do anything with Odyssey, you should get the app. By default this is on and what Odyssey says is that the reason they are introducing a drop at two kilohertz is approximately a three db drop at two kilohertz. They are trying to address what they say is the transition from treater to tweeter. to the woofer or the midrange and that the directivity changes around those two kilohertz, but if you have a high-performance speaker that is not, you are introducing something that is not in the design of the speaker, so we recommend that if you have high Performance speakers turn it off when I took a measurement with Odyssey and forgot to turn it off.

I ran it at the rbhs. I turned on two channel music and I'm going to ask what happened to the vocals. Talented voices softened. processed, they lost much of the transparency I knew was there, and sure enough, midrange compensation was on. They really need, they really need to get this out of their system. It's based on flawed logic on the floor, like old speakers from the '70s and '80s, I mean, anyone worth their salt and the speaker design now doesn't have this big suction in the corner, you know, it just doesn't. They do, I mean, it would show up in the measurements, so yeah, that's the biggest takeaway here.

It's, uh, turning off that two kilohertz filter absolutely across the board, um, and if you want to try it just out of curiosity, listen to the female vocalists and as soon as you identify with the differences, you'll be able to pick it up properly. Now we get to what we really love to talk about, so I want to add one more. I want to interrupt you once again. The best way to determine if you like what the Odyssey is doing is to not listen to it with all your speakers. The best way to determine if you like it is to listen to it only with your two-channel stereo because your brain is much more discernible in the differences with two speakers playing instead of seven or ten speakers playing.

Yes, two channels, the way to do it. It's uh to get over yourself and I also agree with dialing your system into two channel music first before you start going to the home theater because if you dial your system into two channels you can expand it to multiple it's the two channels and your base. Really essential to perfecting your setup, definitely an anemic bass. This is probably the number one complaint about Odyssey and it's not a big deal if you understand what's happening and there's a way to fix it, so this is supposed to again I've disabled that dynamic equalizer and what will happen is that Odyssey can measure by below the base and sub performance of your system between three and six db, so I'm going to read you.

I ran an Odyssey calibration again last week and it generated you and me. we were talking about this so this is what happened if I'm going to use round numbers so if I'm trying to calibrate at 70 db the Odyssey was giving me 6 to six and a half db less output on both of my subs after for Odyssey to run. What you need to do here, guys, is this: Once you're done with Odyssey, you need to pull out that spl and calibrate everything to 75 db. Use the volume on your answer made in avr, play some pink noise and I. i have a link here uh on dynaudio there are a lot of free wave files that you can download and you can play through the avr and you can run these test tones yourself and you will see that there is a significant clipping at the base now it's important, it's important note that if you use pink noise on your receiver I don't think it will do it with Odyssey on that's why you need to use external pink noise that will correct you if that's really gen I'm really glad you mentioned that if you use the manual because you can run the speaker levels on the manual, but it's disabling Odyssey, as I understand it, so all you're doing is running a parametric EQ, not a full odyssey, so you'll do that.

I don't get accurate measurements the manual actually the manual equalizer is geq I wish it was small but for some reason denim and

marantz

have stuck with geq. I hope I've been asking you to change that for 15 years and you keep saying it's going to work. It will happen eventually, but yes, if you run your receiver's internal pink noise to try to calibrate all your levels, it will do so without Odyssey enabled and one thing I also want to mention is that each speaker should read 75 db. like you said but if you have flat bass in your room you could boost the subwoofer a good 4 or 5 db more than the rest of the channels if you have linear bass exactly and you can do that as we will talk about both directly. on the sub or you can do it later in the app with the curve editor, there are a couple of ways to handle that, so if you have an anemic base, here's the thing, adjust it until the sub or subs measure the same spl.

Now it can be intuitive. for you to say, oh, okay, I have maybe two or four subs. I'm just going to meter each sub independently, bring it up to 75db and I'm done, no wait what happens is the moment you add a second sub to the mix. We are actually getting a 3db increase in the total sum measurement, so for example if you have one subwoofer, yes you want to calibrate it to 75db, if you have two subs you will most likely want to calibrate those subs at 72 db each, because when they are played together they will give you a three db boost and the sum will play at 75 db, unless you have both subs on the sides of the center channel, then it will add 60 b because they are located together.

There you go, so measure, measure, measure and the other thing to keep in mind is don't edit anything that we're talking about in the avr, if you did the calibration in the app, any of these changes, like increasing the volume secondary, keep it. in the app, so I have a funny story about that, when I reviewed the marantz sr 8012, it was my first experience with the editing app and it had 11 speakers connected, two subwoofers, I went in and ran Odyssey the conventional way, thinking that after You could open the app and change it. No, I had to rerun the entire calibration.

I wasted about 40 minutes running that whole setup. It's bullshit. One thing I don't like about the app is that you can't do it. Don't make instant changes and hear them immediately every time you make a change, you have to import it back into the receiver, it takes time, so what I would recommend and I hope I'm not getting ahead of myself, we have different speaker presets. Are you going to talk about it or should I wait, no, no, you can talk about it now. I have that um on a specific slide, so if you want to wait, why don't we address that?

Sounds good then, I'll let you. Okay, so actually the next few slides are just for you, so yourmeasures. So why doesn't he talk about what he experienced when he made these measurements? Um with Odyssey for the next few slides here and I'll advance them, okay? is exactly what I was talking about when I installed my system in my family room. I have a sort of asymmetrical room in my old house, the family room open to the kitchen. I had a secondary diagonal location on the opposite walls when I ran Odyssey. You could see it in the red curve, there was significant suction in the 60 to 100 hertz range.

The reason was that when Odyssey set up the delays for my subwoofers, they didn't optimize them relative to my main speakers because every time I do a basic calibration, I do it with the main speakers playing and all the subs playing so you can see right away that I had a phase or a timing misalignment once I dialed in, better fight, better timing lags on my subs, that blue trail existed and that's a beautiful measurement right there. really flat, so the Odyssey actually flattened the response in the 20 to 30 hertz range, which is great because the EQ worked, but in the critical crossover area it ruined my delays and I had to fix it manually and I wouldn't have done it .

I can do that without taking my own measurements, I mean you could do it with music, you could do listening tests, it's a lot of trial and error, but the bottom line is that if you want a really accurate sound in your bass and measurements, you have to take the measurements. , so the other thing to keep in mind is that some enthusiasts get confused because they think, oh look at the odyssey, it just gives me a totally flat curve, that's what my speakers sound like now, but the reality is that's not the case In fact. practice and this graph highlights that yes, definitely, so that's just one, it's just a microphone, look, here's the other thing I notice, a lot of people when they do their calibrations, they measure in one position, I'm not the kind of person of a single position that sounds bad.

Why did I go there? I like to make sure all my seats in whatever I'm listening to have good bass so you can see it here in my family room. I really only cared about the three seats. I had a couch that was placed correctly. and then I had a couch, the other couch was on the side wall and that's where I put the mother in law so whatever happens there is fine so I just wanted to mark the base here and this is the base that I have. in that room with odyssey on with two subs built in with my mains and that's a beautiful measurement that's a really linear basis for a very difficult room with a non-optimal location, the best basis you've ever measured in that room, so my reference point when I configure systems is like in my movie theater.

If I have two rows of seats I always use about 5 dB across the base bandwidth, so in this case it was 18 hertz to 100 hertz on my new system with the big rbh towers, I'll go down to about 15 hertz, yes. so, and it will be in seven seats, that's great, that's just great, so what's your opinion on the flat versus the reference? Let's talk a little about that. See, the reference is that old guy. I think it's based on the old thank-you-over-roll mantra. the treble because movie soundtracks are excessively bright when remastered at home, I just don't like the reference sound, it really dulls the treble too much, personally, I don't like the sound of, in most cases, a full range odyssey I like to limit the correction bandwidth, but in the cases where I liked what the Odyssey was doing, it was always on the flat setting because it doesn't go below the maximums and I do, I'm sure in a ninety percent of what is necessary. two kilohertz notch even if you don't have the app, that's great, that's great, so step eight is optional, but what we recommend is to turn off the dynamic equalizer, turn off the dynamic volume and turn off the lfc, now the lfc just to comment.

Which for a second, how many times have we had people posting on forums saying, you know, my neighbors are complaining on the basis that we're playing well? This is a good application, um, using lfc because what it does, if I understand it correctly, is it takes the frequencies that are below 80 hertz and pushes them up, so it's those really deep notes that are going to have the tendency to travel through walls, so this is actually a really clever option that Odyssey introduces that has a very specific application, so it's actually genetics. It's not as smart as you think, it's basically a high pass filter.

I've measured it, so it eliminates your base response below about 35 hertz, so only use it when the neighbors complain. Yes, it's basically making your big submarine a lot smaller, exactly. and this is really the power of the app, call it, it's really the curve editor, so Odyssey in the past used to be consumer grade and then it used to have a pro kit and the pro kit allowed you to edit curves. So now you have that power on the tablet or on your phone and the nice thing is that if you're doing measurements and you see where you need to modify Odyssey, you now have the ability to add points and curves, so let's say you're there. a pain in the butt by the way, a little bit of a pain, but if you're running Odyssey and you're fine, now I just did my calibration, my bass sounds anemic, I want to have a little bit of headroom gain, so what could you?

What you can do is set a point around 200 250 hertz and then you can raise the bass around 3 db and now you can reintroduce some of that more natural base that we're used to hearing in a room, so yeah, you could basically set it exactly on the damage and targeting curve, uh, it's very easy to make a mistake, so unless you know what you're doing, don't touch the curve editor, but with great power, great responsibility, with great power comes a big responsibility, absolutely, uh, and then this. It's a good opportunity to just talk about something else, other room EQ systems have like the Anthem arc, they don't EQ above 5,000 hertz, so they do it now, actually the answer is the latest firmware, offers full bandwidth unless you select not to.

The default, if I'm not mistaken, is still five kilohertz when I ran Anthem or Genesis. Sorry no Anthem brands Arc Genesis when I ran it to make the str uh video a few weeks ago it said it for full bandwidth so I basically had to tell it to go to 500 hertz well then you and I are fans of not reaching up to 20 kilohertz because we have good speakers. I mean, yeah, if you have good speakers, you really don't. I need to do it, so why don't you talk a little bit about the ability here that odyssey allows you to limit how much you're going to EQ?

So let's talk a little about the Schroeder frequency and why it might be important. option that some enthusiasts will want to take advantage of, so we've talked about this in many other videos, including with anthony gramani, and basically the most effective use of eq is to do it below the schroeder frequency or the transition frequency of the room and there is where the room dominates the sound rather than the speaker dominating the sound, it is very difficult to do a full bandwidth correction and for the microphone to understand what is reflection in the room versus what is poor off-axis performance. speaker, but below two hundred hertz that the standing wave space is what dominates what you're hearing and that's why we need to do eq, so in my experience, using if it's the odyssey anthem, the power is pretty useless.

I won't even include that mackie pioneers are useless, I won't. Throw that in and I have a little bit of experience with drac and a little bit of experience with trinov, but generally speaking I prefer to limit my correction bandwidth to about 500 hertz, so what happens is if you listen to two channel music, it which I noticed with odyssey in particular, it tends to give you a stronger phantom center for two channels, but also at the expense of collapsing the soundstage, that's been my experience with it and sometimes, as you said, it could sound well processed , so gene, let's say.

Someone, I mean, there are a lot of great articles on how to measure the Schroeder frequency of your room, it's not the same in every room, so if someone doesn't want to go through the trouble of doing rta measurements, our recommendation is basically to choose . 200 hertz 300 hertz gives a probability of hearing, you're probably going to hit somewhere close to the shortest frequency, uh, for your room, if you're just zooming in there, yeah, okay, and then this is actually a really feature. interesting, I don't know. I have it on the 8500 and I'm jealous so I've used it.

I've been familiar with Anthem Ark for many years and one of the things I loved about Anthem Arc is that you could have up to four measurements. so you might be thinking well, why would you do four measurements? I'm not talking about measuring in eight locations, I'm talking about doing one measurement, then doing another measurement and a full set and think about this, there are some setups where an enthusiast you have one screen and you will listen to music or movies with the screen down, in other cases you'll have that screen up there, maybe you'll have a different furniture configuration, curtains, curtains, all that stuff, so you've been able to make measurements save them, load them and assign them to a different input.

Now Odyssey has never had that capability and it was really first introduced with the eq editor app, so let me walk you through a way to do this and then I'll tell you how cool it is. With Denon Marantz 2020 and newer models you can take multiple measurements, save and name them in the eq app, and then when you're ready to play some content in your setup, all you have to do is load it directly from the eq. editing application load it on your processor or your avr, it will take you about 60 seconds, boom, you did it right.

The new models actually have an option called speaker preset, so what you can do is load different presets into the avr and then either with the two three four keys that are on the remote or using the options menu or any home automation system, you can instantly switch between presets, which is just a great feature that has been introduced in

denon

and marantz avrs, so that's nice. About that also is that if you have two different calibrations that you've done, you can activate them on the fly and see which one you prefer exactly, so in your case you don't have two speaker presets, but you do have them. the ability to store all your system settings via USB.

Yes, what I do in my particular case, has the ability to do it via USB. What I find most convenient is to just store it in the Odyssey app, so I'll have it on my phone. I can send it through the Mac side either by email or using an airdrop and then I have it on both my iPad and my phone and then what I'll do is I'll take my raw calibration and then I'll duplicate it and then what I'll do is make any adjustments or configuration changes that I want to clone and then I'll just name it appropriately, it could be filtered, it could be raise the curtains, whatever it is, so yeah, it's not as fancy as what they've done, but it's light years from where we were just three four years ago, so we got a super talk here from John Lim, thoughts on rats, Buddhist tool for adjusting the curve. edit files without using fingers, how come no one talks about three secondary settings?

I don't know that tool you're talking about, but yeah, I wish the curve editing app was easier to use, even being able to put um eq manually. put, you know, the numbers in there and put the numbers, that's what it would be like, yeah, I mean, that's what the original was like, that's what their pro box was like years ago, that thing was really easy to use in that sense, in that Regarding three sub setups, um, I've done weird sub setups before and generally in a rectangular room you're better off with even multiples of subs, but if you're in an oddly shaped room I've done systems where I had two subs. up front and then I drove a sub in the back to take care of a null that I couldn't fix and that worked, but generally speaking we go with two or four.

This is another good question. I would like to respond here. How many positions should we allow for Odyssey to calibrate? My experience is that you know all eight. It's good to do eight measurements if you have time, but you can do quite well just doing four or five, as long as you don't abuse the positions. the microphone, I agree, I like five or eight, because if you're doing it, in my case, I'm doing 13.2 and it takes about 45 minutes, so it's almost an hour when I finish doing a calibration with eight videos and then, If your wife comes in and moves the couch, you have to do it all over again.

Do you have more slides? This is just the list ofi set up with the discreet one and then i had some of those atmos enabled speakers just call them bounce house the bounce house speakers reviewed several of them and they are fine for particular applications you don't get the discreet placement but it does provide some It's kind of of psychoacoustic effect, so when it comes to sound bars, you know your mileage is going to vary, you have to have side walls and it's just not going to work in some of these rooms where you have the TV on the side.

It doesn't have a side wall on the left or right side the effect just won't be there so as long as I have it I'll get a sound bar for better sound than my TV has and if I get anything close to that dsp experience well and the other thing about jumping speakers not to get too off topic, but when they first came out I thought this is not a good idea, especially without good directivity control, control and dispersion, and they should really be above the ear level right, they didn't even tell you that, they basically said put them anywhere, put them near your fish tank, they get located very easily if you're too close to a surround speaker, the other thing is just the bounce effect. works in a very narrow listening area, not as good as when you have discrete speakers raining down on you, super Blue Kid wank, thanks buddy, five bucks, thanks and yeah, I can't wait to see Godzilla versus Kong, can't, oh Yeah.

I saw that my brother is excited about it. My brother is like one of the least computer literate people you'll ever meet, but he figured out how to check his spectrum account, create an ID so he could set up imax, and press. imax hbo max sorry all these hbo max maxes on a smart tv so you could prepare for godzilla vs king kong. As an aside, it's pre-pandemic, our local theater here did a Godzilla double feature night, so it was a community event. They had awards, they had kids on stage and they had one of the local hobby shops that had custom artwork for all the Godzilla and Kaiju themed movies and it's just great.

You know, I grew up with that stuff. I love classic science fiction and anything. Better, when I was a kid we had, you know, eight millimeter cameras. I spent hours doing stop-motion. Godzilla. Maybe we would always have a Godzilla in our Christmas town and I would have him crushing our Christmas town. all these videos about it yeah we all grew up with godzilla so this is a super talk for you by john lim oh someone really understands greek yasuo john thank you so much for telling me i haven't been to santorini. I would love to go one day and watch the sunsets and you can't go past thakya which is the gene for lamb chops and oh god I love lamb chops yeah and we grill lamb at our festival, so you have to come.

I'm going back to Florida when this pandemic is over and I have a couple of really good Greek restaurants. Where I live now we have a food truck in my neighborhood and they have um, I guess it's called Mama Ganoush or something like that. it's a very similar mediterranean type of greek but also lona have you been to tarpon springs or not, yes i have been to tarpon you know my uh my father in law was in clearwater beach you know that one other time when i came to visit you and it's just amazing there, the Greek community, so you know what I'll do one day.

I'm going to have to do Greek and audio, so you know I mentioned, uh, you know, Michael, yeah, I mean. you have class a you know kitty aki these will be my long term project uh contributions from the greeks and high end audio so i have a follow up on that super chat here g in the super chat i asked my question It was supposed to say that going from two to four subs can cause more seat spl deviation or what are the disadvantages of having more subs, I mean, unless you configure them wrong, there are not four subs instead of two that actually equalize the base response more and get more headroom um, you know, this is interesting because I always see on the forums that these people get these giant subwoofers like dual 18s or similar subwoofers that have a lot more output than their speakers and I think you have you have to have a balance.

My point is that I like to have the same dynamic range if possible for all the right bandwidth and you don't necessarily need to get these giant subs because you get multiple subs that's why companies like jl audio don't make a bigger driver than a 13 inch driver, your solution is to add more subs properly and you get a low frequency coupling effect, uh factor, even if they are not located in the same place so you could get medium sized subs, put four of them in a room and it will perform similar to a super sub and you will have more seats to see the agreed consistency and you know most people don't know that that is the case and if there is something we can convey at least in the message of this night is the importance of multiple subtitles for genetic performance with all the comments that are flowing uh there is a comment about basic odyssey with basic odyssey, do you recommend placing the microphone in all eight locations on the diagram or just in the main listening position .

I've seen this recommended by some people on youtube and no, no, not just in the main position, absolutely uh gen and I agree that you should do at least five measurements and if possible, Eight, you want you to hit Odyssey the data you need about what the audio looks like when you enter that area. You know you're not alone in your head, you're not alone in one position, and you need to give Odyssey the data it needs. uh five to eight positions are what we recommend, yeah, and you know, also realize that you're not necessarily going to get better sound on the side wall.

I mean, there's almost nothing you can do with eq to fix it, if you really have to get it. good seating position. I see so many people spending tons of money like I told you. Now I see about five six people a week and they want to have about thirty thousand dollars invested in speakers and they say I need more speakers or I need better speakers. I say no. You need a better location. You need to remove that couch from the back wall. You need to remove that other couch from the side wall. You know you need to treat your room a little.

You can't have tile floors. and glass everywhere, you need to get rid of some of that reflection, like Anthony Gramani said, you want to have about 15 absorption, 15 diffusion, that's a good rule of thumb and two extra genes to build, that's why the first one is important. measurement. what you're doing has to be in that primary listening position and precise because that's what Odyssey uses to measure speaker distances if I'm not mistaken and then to reiterate because in chat yes, absolutely, if you can do a treatment in the room before. you apply any room correction remember room correction there's a kind of genetic analogy it's the cherry on top you don't want to make your bazooka that's not room correction room correction is there to take care of the other things um that you haven't been able to of addressing in traditional media, you know, the other good thing about that dual speaker preset is that if you want two sweet spots, you know, if you have two rows of seats in my old theater, I like to sit in the front row to focus more on the music because I was closer to the front speakers and I sat in the back row for movie effects because that's where I had like eight surround speakers, so it's cool that not even necessarily the acoustic environment changes when you raise or lower the curtains, but actually have two. sweet spots, depending on where you want to look, you can switch between those great different calibrations, so we've got another super talk here.

I have a 4700 jean with front rise and back rise. Should I lie down on the avr or should I say on the roof? Pros and Cons This is a good question because I have never received a direct answer from anyone. Asked. I asked Dolby. I asked Dannon. I asked the engineers who designed this why you probably want to do this. calling them front heights in back heights is because you want to do oral 3d, that's what I've done too and if you don't, if you don't select heights instead of tops, you can't use the aura feature on the receivers.

I can talk a little about what I've done if it's gene Why don't you finish your thought? I'm not convinced there's much difference other than a task. I'll let you talk about it because I've tried it both ways and you tell me what you think, so what I do in my particular setup right now is I have the Dolby Atmos layout, so in my setup here I have a Gold 3D canonical and I have Adobe Atmos, so do I have both sets of in-ceiling speakers? What I've done is I've used the Oro 3D design, but I'm actually using it with atmosphere, location, if you will, on the ceiling, right on the ceiling, you know?

I've tried the um I remember what those little speakers are, the angled SVs and the main lift, the main lift ones, I had them to review, uh, and I tried them, but right now I'm using my front atmos speakers slightly ahead of the rbhs. and then I'm using the side height speakers on each side and it sounds great, I mean it really does, I'll know, I love oral, I just lost concentration because what people agreed to, I bought a Green Screen that was going to use in Stream Yard, but that damn thing is too small and I could see the rest of my room, so it's back there and it looks like I'm going to have a halo over me, okay?

I don't know, there might be something in there for audio. Enthusiasm. Someone asked about shelf life and I just missed the question. Something over 100. Well, there was a comment here asking about setting lifetime at 80 or 120 hertz. I would set it to 120 because the lfe track is separate from the summed output of your subwoofer. The LFE track can go up to 120 Hertz, so leave it at full range or at the default setting. Oh, here it is, so let's respond that you got another super talk here from Brian. I don't want to. say his last name because I will kill him gentlemen I plan to build a double bass ensemble okay any ideas on this approach to even basing it on home theater.

I don't know enough about it to speak intelligently about it. I'll have to look that up, but it sounds great, at any time you can add more woofer to your system, yeah, sorry, I couldn't answer that for you, if Matthew was here he could answer, let's see what's okay, oh, this is interesting. I found some slight differences between specifying front height, rear height, and front top rear height on my 8500 front. I can create more audio objects, oh okay, I mean, yeah, I don't really know what it does, to be honest with you, I guess there are differences. but if it's as subtle as you claim and you want to be able to personally participate in oral 3D, I think Aura 3D is a dead format.

I know people like the vertical mixer, but you already know what the Dolby surround mixer is when you turn to the center. is amazing, so I wouldn't compromise my atmosphere placement just to accommodate gold, unless you want to listen to, you know, obscure music from Europe because there aren't many musical selections from any of the albums here in the United States, even when I did the Gold demos and we did the reviews. I had to contact them and they had to send me European records. It's just not possible to get things easily. That's really frustrating. I love it. and i have to talk offline about the extended dolby center so i can do it on the 8500 because i love the aura 3d up mixer its what i use for all my standard content unless it's native atmos or dtsx or imax enhanced so i played with the oro before i moved i changed it, i did what you did with the simon speaker so i could get auro running and i didn't think the uh oro up mixer sounded better than the dolby up mixer when set up correctly. so there's a good question here with object-based envelope formats: is there still a case for bipolar dipole envelopes?

There is never a case for dipole surrounds not with discrete audio dipoles should die, they were intended for the days when we didn't have discrete surround sound We are trying to simulate surround sound using mixes of rear channel information models. Don't use dipoles at all. The bipoles are questionable. In my movie theater a couple of years ago I was using bipoles for my side channels because I have two rows of seats I wanted to have a lot of coverage um when I switched to Atmos I noticed I wasn't hearing much difference in the layers between ear level and height because I only had eight foot ceilings, there was maybe only four feet differential when I switched to monopoles it was much better, everything was more focused.

I could hear the differential between ear level and height. I would if you're doing atmos and you're serious about atmos and you don't know it. 12 foot ceilings or 10 foot ceilings. I would use monopoles about a couple of feet above the surroundings of level three andthen you would put the Atmos speakers in the ceiling and you will be much happier. Gene. There is a question you might enjoy answering. because we've talked about this about why Odyssey sets speaker levels uh 12 db lower using xlr or the uh balanced versus rca connection, well there's a 6 db difference between the balanced and the unbalanced um, I'm not sure that Whether it's someone setting up a processor, it has to be a processor and it has to be a Marantz at that point if they're using a balance, but that's the point is really the gain and not a lot of people are aware that you know there's a difference between unbalanced or single ended and balanced or xlr well the thing is if you have something like i know people like to criticize thx but thx sets some good standards like they have a standard gain of 29 db on an amplifier and the xlr outputs.

They are 6 db hotter, but the amplifier's xlr inputs are 60 db lower, so the levels are the same as going from balanced to single end, but not all of them follow that nomenclature. I have the hymn str uh separated and its balanced and unbalanced outputs are on the same level and I've never seen that before, so everyone is always with the hymn. I had that experience with the old anthem amps and would actually get more gain using the xlr connections and the single end. and then they fixed that in later versions of the mca amps so the center extension is back because you guys took my call to action and when I announced that the center extension was quietly removed from the receivers and I made a couple of videos and articles.

There was a lot of fuss and I think a lot of people wrote in to Dolby because I got an email from all the engineers at Sound United saying we were bringing this feature back so yes you should have the center extension back and thank you all. for recovering to recover it I can't believe there are still so many people here man it must be the Greek it's Greek luck ah there you go it's ibakia it's the earth it's during lent here oh my god man I'm actually you're craving some Greek food right now When when you and Berta come one day I'm going to grill and I'll take care of you guys you like a little meat you have some Greek meat it's very good a little bit of everything I'm going to make you some fresh tzatziki what do you mean that you don't eat any meat, okay, we have lamb, I love that movie, you know, as much as I love my big fat Greek, when is that when I'm quoting?

Have you heard of a comedian named Sebastián Moloskako? No, I'm not, my God, he well, he is what he is to the Greeks he is to the Italians. He grew up in an Italian home. Everything he does this guy is very relatable if you grew up. in New York and you are Italian, he never talks about politics, he talks about his father and it's just comedy gold, look him up on YouTube, if you can, guys, look up Sebastián Molescalco, he is, by far, the best, he has the best game of Science fiction. I have seen it in years very funny.

Are you going to send me some links. We're going to have. I want to send you. I'll send you some links. Yes, someone said the anthem bow is broken now and I've heard conflicting things. About that, I know they were having a problem with the calibration of the separate subwoofer, but I didn't think the ark itself was broken. Now you know, I don't want to speak authoritatively about this. I was on the Genesis beta team, so you know. As far as I know, if you have one of the pre-avm 70 and 90 models, it's fine, I think it still works, don't quote me on that, but you know, I have my system hooked up and it's fine.

As I understand it, there is a problem with the newer models that have come out, making our genesis work, so there might be some inaccurate information I have in there, but that's what I understand, the doorbell joke is yes, some people do. You know, Sebastian, man. Kids should really know him. Someone is asking about Hypex. In fact, we have a purifier. We build a purification module and an amplifier module. And we're going to do some bench testing because class D is the future, my friends, as I've already said. Before I run all the class D in my theater room, their Pascal module is really good, I chose the Pascal because they are more easily produced and have good power supplies.

Purify is probably the best metering amp ever, except maybe. the reference amp but it has an expandable platform it looks really awesome i know the engineer designed it the guy is brilliant bruno putzy he's like the best amp designer class ever so yeah we'll cover it for sure . Someone's here Taylor, since you have all these weird speaker setups, which one would you recommend? You know, the funny thing is that I don't have widths, so that's the only thing I can't comment on and that's the most important improvement you can make. Well, we heard that we feel the direction better laterally than above and behind us, so I want to say that it is more difficult to implement wide speakers.

I really wish they came out with a speaker that is wide for flush mounting and has an angled baffle. Know? Could it be much more practical than placing a tower right on a path? Well, that's the problem in the configuration. Know? I'm 14 feet wide here. this space and okay, you know, putting the widths really causes a problem which is actually a great point from a design. Yes, I asked rbh and they are kind of investigating it, but what I did for now was pre-wiring for widths. but I put them in the ceiling, put an extra pair of front speakers on angled baffles and I'm going to try to run them as wide as possible and see how they sound, otherwise I'll just run them as an extra pair of high channels and wait to do the extensive update.

Got one more super chat from Can Do, man. You're on fire tonight. Thanks for the great information when you mentioned that bipolar dipoles were bad. I use cliffs rs62s. This surrounds a 7.1.4 application configuration. replace them if they are bipolar are these I don't know if they are dipoles or bipoles I'm not familiar with that model um if you like the way they sound you don't know don't change things just because I said so I mean if you like it, stick with it, but in Ultimately, I'm not a big fan of dipoles for discrete surround sound.

I've heard the difference bipoles can work in a large room if you know the large seating area you want. to have better coverage and you have enough height differential from ear level to the top, but if you don't and you can't locate the difference between the surround speakers you know and their height channels, then you might want to consider do it. monopoles I did some pink noise testing at my old place and I couldn't tell when I had bipoles on if the speaker was in the ceiling or next to me and when I went from the side channel to the height channel it was very hard for me to tell the difference until I switched to monopoles.

Has anyone tried or owned the jbl synthesis? Anthony. We received another super talk from Anthony. Thanks, Anthony, guys. I'm trying to end this here, but everyone is moving on and I'm not. I don't have my chocolate fix tonight. I didn't bring chocolate here. You know, Anthony Grimani and I have chocolate competitions and I've been eating too much chocolate since he was doing livestreams with us. And you like chocolate. I also mean guys, if you want really good chocolate, go to Whole Foods or even go to your local supermarket, look for teo bar, it's there, it's him, they marked it as him, I wish I liked the salty one, It's like dark. like a 70 dark with salt very good delicatessen you sent me a bar if you're right I'm an ass like that well, what I will tell you is that if anyone is a chocolate snob and I mean, they really, really, really love chocolate. so what you have to do is get some of the champagne truffles from the maison du chocolat, so yes my wife orders them to come in that box, yes yes I gave it to my wife when we got engaged and they have a store in manhattan they have a couple of them and at that time the owner or the president uh robert the lynx if I remember his name correctly did a chocolate taste test they had a private room in the back so I think we had It was a session of two hours with the president of the company tasting the best chocolate from all over the world, so there is a lot to die for.

Oh, now you're making me hungry. Greek food and chocolate. What else do you want? There is nothing else. I want, that's right, I didn't mention Leonida, so I guess I should eat Leonida chocolate, yeah, yeah, okay, oh, you know, uh, oh, Alvin, hey, buddy, Alvin's another rbh guy, he's got the svtr svt system like you, how are you doing elvin? thanks for the super. chat alvin the best speakers aren't they they're really cool fat guys you know I wanted to tell you that I put on um disney plus yeah and I went this is the first time you guys have to put up with me I'm I'm usually not a TV person but I have the Sony televisions 2021, the truly incredible 900 series.

You have an 85 in my family room and a 65 in the bedroom and when I put on Disney Plus and Star Wars it was on um. it was on dolby on uh dolby enhanced couldn't believe the quality of the picture dolby vision dolby vision yeah holy yeah yeah sure I mean I actually found myself watching jar jar binks again misa thinks you're used to liking it gene oh damn , you're good, you're good, have you ever seen palpatine robot chicken, robot chicken is canon, i don't care what anyone says, that's more canon than the star wars sequels, fucking seth macfarlane, man that's brilliant, i watch everything that. all day it just makes me laugh that's cool nice nice there you have the real deal you see and now I'm trying to get it I'm trying to promote cross platforms like I want I want like chocolate companies and things that aren't related to home theater I want that these type of guys advertise on audio hawks because we don't just listen to music, we consume good things, we are consumers, we consume good audio, we consume good food, I want to have these types of other companies here. man I need help with that maybe you could help me.

I want some of these chocolate companies to advertise and give us some free samples. I mean it was an unsolicited and unplanned product placement. Yeah, and hey, James Larson is here. Give him a camera so he can start streaming live with us. Someone is asking you a question. Any opinions on imotiva or the monolith processor. James. I know James reviewed the http and it's awesome. Check out my review and it works. It is enough. It is a solid platform. I have that review on audiohawks, it should still be on the home page of audiohawks.com. I should probably do a video overview of their review because it was actually a really good review, really thorough, it seems such, I mean, amazing what monoprice has done in such a short period of time, it's amazing how they've really embraced to the home theater crowd yeah oh yeah that's awesome this is probably what this is and the guys behind some of the engineers behind the controller designs they have since this is an unlisted product placement , I mean, this is the headphone amp that I use, oh, that's the one thank you, right, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know I'm a big fan, so it's the same, it's the same circuit topology that It's in the benchmarks, yeah, so you know the guys behind me, I probably shouldn't say this, but it's one in the morning on a Sunday and who's listening to the guys behind the controller design of the model price subwoofers, those really punchy subwoofers, it's the same guy behind the crippling speakers as us.

We're going to talk about this very soon. Have you seen the parallelism of the company? They are throwing a hammer. Wait. I can't wait to install those speakers. I want to listen. You will call me and tell me. your impression of the speakers once you turn them on because I read the first impressions, the review, it's the first speaker to hit that hx dominus asian dominus ominous domain, put it this way when I'm on the phone with the guy who is the designer of that company, I feel like an idiot, like this guy is so smart that you would ever get into these conversations with people who just know this guy has been in the industry for decades.

Talk to you, any of us audio junkies, uh, you know. multitude of reviewers it's like you know, I don't know if everyone understands this, but there are multiple peer reviews that happen every time we do a review, so if I get a review that's not at least, maybe less than 25 percent marked . I feel like an A because Gina is always the last one to peer review, always two people, two peer reviews and the first one is the most brutal. The reviewers name is Steve Feinstein. He used to be the marketing director of Atlantic Technology. Break our review. like new, he says: why did you say this?

This is terrible and he will go and put up a report on how you should change this. So yeah, our stuff is pretty well vetted. Hey, we have another super talk from Anthony. I connectfrom a Blu-ray player to an old AV receiver via RCA if the Blu-ray player has a good DAC. I have the Panasonic 9000, which is a good Blu-ray player, but you won't get multi-channel surround sound if you have it. That is, I don't know if the Panasonic supports sacd or hi-res, but if you want to do two channels you can, but ultimately the only way to get multichannel and at most is through HDMI. so no generally speaking i don't recommend just doing analog yeah and also asking if i have an older avr and yet i have really a top of the line one its almost like having the udp 205 the opponent is hey , if it's a pretty good dac in there and if that rig is better than the one in the avr then you know what you can really hear a difference , yeah man I still have my udp 205 , I'm not selling it , I sold mi 203 for almost double the retail price and now they're looking at like triple, I mean, use, it's hard to get, it's hard to get a universal ultra HD Blu-ray player that also works with sacd.

You're right, I have a 203 here, I have the 205 with the um with the rebels and I'm not getting rid of them, I transmit runes through them without problems, it's great, they sound great, they handle everything and you know, we, like audio enthusiasts, we lost quite a bit when the opponent had to retreat from the crowd and we. I'm looking for help, well there is a company coming. I have an article. I haven't published it. We have about 30 articles in admin right now ready to publish. Like I'm a content hog so I try to just separate it so I can keep the traffic you know but there's a company that's using the mediatek platform and it looks like they're trying to take oppo's place and they should post that , I probably guess I'll post it at the end of next week I'll send you a copy and put it on our patreon so everyone can read it on patreon first, but yeah, it looks like there's a company that's trying to take Oppo's place Now, that would be great. yeah I think we're going to finish this it's an hour and 45 minutes it's late you have to go to work tomorrow I have to get up and take my daughter to school it's always fun and then sleep for a couple of hours and start over again , so it's always fun to hang out, gen, you know, it's like we can't do our visits in person, but just being able to, um, you know, shoot and talk about this stuff and just air clothes live.

Transmits at two in the morning. Make jar jar binks. I do. I do a scary impression that's really good. No, I also do a terribly good Elmo impression, so we'll save those impressions for another time. Don't let me start. making you palpatine oh man don't put me through last super chat here any news on the hdmi 2.1 bug found on yamaha ibr jeans there is a fix in the offing and I can't announce it yet um you guys will be happy if you are a solid united owner and should be here soon that's all I can say about it without getting into trouble it's great and I think my wife said forgive us Elmo so we're going to have to keep our wives clean me too.

I have talked about this good idea. Yes, I have audiophile wives. My wife is starting a blog about what it's like to live with an audiophile and home theater buff. So we've got it all set up and I'm exposing myself to total embarrassment and I'm ready we need to have more women in audio man I mean let me tell you something interesting about my wife we're setting up this audiohawk smart home and I'm like you know what we should do all the flush mounting in the family room like on the front wall and all good, she says no she wants speakers there.

I wonder: are you crazy? I already have eight-foot towers in my movie theater. I have five feet. towers in my in my music room here you really would rather she leave, yeah, I don't want to have all these holes in our walls. I'm fine then and could always improve them. I know they are small now. I started with the 800 f paradigm. I have a feeling those will be iconic towers in a couple of years. Anthony send us another super chat. What are some good old center speakers for the top of your head? Well you. You can see our reviews.

James Larson covered a lot of speakers. He really liked that they weren't too old, but Polk's center channel on his Legend series was really good. Trying to think of the older ones. tends to be really good, you know, instead of just saying, the mtms could be good too, like um jean, why don't you define that for some, like the woofer, the midrange tweeter, you have a woofer in each side and then you have a midrange? and then a tweeter never get a center channel that has tweeters on opposite ends of the cabinet that is white truck material, never make those thousand dollar speakers and if you buy them now I will give them eighty percent.

Hey, I'll tell you if you want to listen to some good old speakers, old Snell like the A5s and the whole Snell era from the late '90s and early '00s when Kevin was there. Kevin's books from uh Harmon made a great sound. speakers for old stuff, um, you know better than the best center channel speaker I've heard to date, believe it or not, it's the rbh sv 821 and it's just two eight-inch woofers with the amt tweeter in the middle, but It is active. and when I got that thing dialed, I was like a holy cow, these voices sound so incredibly real and clear and I'm going to use a version of that that matches my main speakers, it has the 3 8 and it will be on the back wall. the screen acoustically transparent, so it will be at the same listening level as the main speakers, but some of the older, some of the older infinity uh center channels, the infinity had a primus center channel that had two mids, a tweeter and then two woofers.

On the side, I forgot the model number which was actually a pretty good center channel too, you know Anthony, if you can use them, the original performa, the revel performa center channel is excellent, uh, I still use the performa 2 at the moment with the halls and it's just a really cool center channel uh and even though you wanted older the svs ultra center channel is fabulous I love it and it's what I use down here yeah what do you do? So you have three systems, so you have the rbh system. you have the revel system and you have svs, yeah, and now I have the svs mixed with the rbh because the rbh is just the front, left and right channels, oh okay, and then I have a fbs uh 16 ultra uh.

Paired with these halls, there you have it, there's a good one, God, dear, have you ever heard the prelude to infinity? No, oh man, look, I'm old school, I'm like that was the first speaker Harmon came out on. With that I had active bass control like they, you know how they have their sound field management system. Now this was like the first iteration, I think it was like a one or two band parametric EQ and it had base modules on the sides and a bunch of deals and a tweeter and that was like one of the best speakers that Infinity made and now Infinity is like they don't do anything with the brand anymore.

It's sad, it was so amazing. What was that? It was like sixty thousand dollars. and I had the inline set of tweeters and then a separate base set, you know, so that was before Harmon and I sold one of those systems when I worked at Cooper for stereo in the '90s in St. Petersburg and that was a to follow forward mcgowan from uh ps audio just got one, got a reward, i think so, i mean that was back in the heyday, that was an amazing system that takes up a lot of space, yeah, a lot of space, yeah, had to do it.

I installed one of those that always bothered me in the past because I was into bodybuilding, so they say, oh, just let Gene move all the heavy equipment. Now I have back problems to show for it, thanks, I don't like moving. heavy equipment I'm there with you class d all the way yes definitely small satellites and lots of submarines okay that being said I'm going to finish this teo thanks for taking so much time two hours man that's crazy . I don't think I've ever done a livestream that long, but you know, we've kept over 200 people here for two hours that says something that says they like you more than me, so we'll keep going. you're coming back no they just want the Greek food and they want the chocolate tip that's all I know guys I hope you enjoyed this live stream.

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