Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion What's New At Axiom A1400-8 Digital Amplifier Pics

That boy is going to go crazier than he already is

Maybe he'll be so busy with his new gadget that his computer will go unused for a few days.

He has been very quiet the past couple days, perhaps the session with JP and whatever medication was prescribed is doing the trick.

Ha ha, I guess I know what my reputation is. I haven't been talking much because since I replaced my Xbox 360, I got caught up with some of the Xbox Live Arcade games that came out. I'm really liking Carcassonne, even though I'm not smart enough to be really good at it yet.

Thanks, Amie, for the pictures! Hopefully I'll be a good parent... though as it stands, I don't have a proper crib for it. It will have to sit on a box in front of the entertainment stand until I either get a new stand or move my system to the basement. Oh, great. Now you're not going to send it, are you?

You're forgiven if it's a nice box .

Wellllll, right now I have my Onkyo receiver and Integra preamp sitting on an Xbox 360 box. It's actually the box for the Core system, not the Elite which I just got. Should I switch those out?

But yeah, I was too impatient to wait for the amplifier before messing with the preamp. I'm liking it so far, and of course there are a lot more options than on the receiver. I do appreciate the menu system a lot more. On the receiver, unless I wanted to change settings through the panel on the front, I would have to hook up a composite video cable to traverse the really bland-looking menu. Now there's at least some blue in the menu, and the text is much smoother at the higher resolution. I ran the Audyssey auto-setup, and I had to redo the channel levels manually, but the distances seemed to be spot-on, except for the subwoofer, which I assume was a way higher distance to account for the DSP processing. Is there any problem with letting it account for this through the distance setting as opposed to delay settings?

Distance and delay should be the same thing. They're related by the speed of sound.

I've discovered that auto-cal is a good start but you have to trust your ears. My Denon mic and my meter couldn't, for some reason, account for the fact that I have a large staircase beside my right M80 and QS8 but my ears could. I actually ended up tweaking all the channel levels to my liking because I found that setting them all to match the same SPL at my sweet spot simply wasn't giving me the right experience.

You should put your A1400 on the box that has the lowest parasitic impedance to ground .

That's a good point on the calibration. I might try just be ear sometime and see how it turns out.

And yeah, about SPL levels, it seems like you're often talking about changing the levels of certain channels for certain material. This is definitely not a hobby for lazy people, if you really want the most out of your system, huh?

That's right but you know after all the tweaking, I found that I only need to use the following:

1. Stereo: calibrated levels.

2. PLIIx for music: for some pieces (jazz and classical), lower the volume on the fronts by 5dB to deepen the sound-stage. For all other pieces, use calibrated levels. For some other pieces, go to a phantom centre.

3. PLIIx for TV/cable: calibrated levels

4. PLIIx for movies: calibrated levels but sometimes boost the center as required. A couple of times I used a phantom center.

5. Dolby and DTS for music and movies: calibrated levels with some minor and movie-dependent adjustment on the centre.

Hey, that doesn't sound so bad when you have it all collected like that.