TV digital audio mess:
Got a Samsung S90D 65" TV over the holidays to replace our almost 15 year old 47" Vizio.
Fire Stick 4K had to be connected directly to the TV because the old Yamaha RX-V665 AV receiver doesn't support 4K HDMI. Receiver also doesn't support eARC, so I had to connect a TOSLINK optical audio cable from the TV to the receiver.
The TV absolutely refuses to output optical audio unless I also leave it connected via HDMI for some reason. It's totally bizarre!
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I'm eyeing the Denon AVRX1800H as a possible replacement for the 15 year old Yamaha, which would simplify things greatly:
This means the Fire Stick 4K should work when connected to either the receiver or the TV, and only an HDMI cable between the receiver and TV should be needed in either case.
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Ordered a factory refurb Denon AVRX1800H from accessories4less, as they're an authorized retailer with the same terms but another $100 cheaper than Denon's website (which was $200 cheaper than new). I imagine that Denon gets value out of a retailer providing first-line return processing, and/or doesn't want to undercut the business of a retailer that moves a lot of product.
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The Denon AVRX1800H showed up. Swapped the speakers, Fire Stick 4K, HDMI-adapted Wii, and TV over to it.
First thing I found is that having configured it for bi-wired front speakers, the front L/R test tones were inaudible until I swapped which outputs each front speaker's drivers were connected to - does this mean one set of drivers is dead on my tower speakers? Hopefully it won't matter since I have bookshelf replacements on the way (provided they are in good condition).
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After mucking around with settings, I went through the Audyssey calibration. This was an almost identical process to the old Yamaha RX-V665, except the Denon allows testing at multiple listening positions (I guess it averages them out?).
I think it ended up a bit of a mess. The subwoofer ended up too boomy and had to be turned down after the fact; I wonder if it's because it was asleep at the beginning of the first test? It actually said it adjusted the volume down from 0dB though...
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It also knocked the center channel down too far IMO, and detected a higher crossover frequency on it versus the surrounds, even though the center has two equal-or-larger drivers and is from the same set.
Anyway, it's still listenable, and I'll be redoing the calibration anyway once the bookshelf speakers show up.
I did bump the subwoofer from -3.5dB to -7.0dB though, because it felt so boomy that I was worried the entire neighborhood could hear it.
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I will say it has a nice menu system on the HDMI out, but would probably be a pain to navigate via the front panel instead (the Yamaha's sparse menus were easily navigable on either the TV or the front panel).
Both the Fire Stick 4K and Wii video seems to mostly work fine. The Denon seems to only support upscaling to 8K, so with my 4K TV it just passes through everything untouched (which is fine).
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I say "mostly" because for some reason I was getting stuttering when watching a 4K Star Wars movie on Disney+. It did go away after power cycling everything, so hopefully it was a fluke.
The Denon recognizes Atmos signals from the Fire Stick 4K (which doesn't matter much since I only have/want a 5.1 setup) - except when it sometimes doesn't, and I have to tickle the surround mode for some reason.
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I was going to test its ability to matrix decode Netflix' stereo mis-advertised as 5.1, but we've reached season 3 of Peaky Blinders, which actually has a real 5.1 soundtrack. I'll have to go back and test with an older episode later.
If it can't matrix decode this case, I can probably work around it by forcing the Fire Stick 4K to stereo (by restricting audio format to PCM).
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The last thing to get used to is that the Denon loves to mute itself whenever the audio or video signal changes, or I got into our out of a menu on the receiver, etc.
At first I got really frustrated, but it seems to snap out of it after a couple seconds if I'm patient. Probably it's trying to avoid clicking or major audio level changes, or just trying to wait for the signal to stabilize.
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Decided to download a random decibel meter app on my phone and see how the receiver's test tones registered out of each speaker - and it was a mess. Adjusted them all at a couple of volume levels, and I think it sounds much better.
I think the subwoofer is actually spot-on when playing Dolby Surround decoded stereo, so it's only 5.1 or Atmos LFE that's too boomy. I swear I found a separate setting for that, but only once - maybe it only appears while such content is active?
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While testing Metroid Prime 2 on the Wii, which has 3D positional audio via Dolby Pro Logic II, I noticed that the surrounds were way too loud - even thought the receiver's test tones seemed fine.
I ended up setting a Flat EQ and turning off some dynamic leveling crap, and it sounded much more balanced.
I'm pretty happy with the sound now, except that I'm tempted to enable light compression - which unfortunately brings the volume way up - because TV shows have silly dynamic range now.
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The new old-stock speakers showed up yesterday - Infinity Primus P150 bookshelf speakers to go with my center/surrounds/subwoofer of the same vintage.
Re-ran the receiver's calibration, and this time it put the sub at -12dB, which I'd heard means the sub is too loud and the correction bottomed out. This also confirms that the initial calibration messed up because the sub was asleep at the very start. Reduced volume knob from 30% to 25% and tried again, and result was much more reasonable.
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In fact, all the numbers came out more reasonable - probably owing to my more conservative placement of the calibration mic on tests 2 and 3.
Post-tuning with my phone's crude dB meter resulted in only minor adjustments as well (another good sign).
I should mention that I set the speakers on top of the old towers that they are replacing, and also put the old receiver under the center channel to elevate the latter, since it sits significantly lower on an entertainment center.
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I don't know if it's because of the timbre matching, or the tweeters being in better shape, but positional audio tests via YouTube and Wii games proved a lot more immersive.
While watching Peaky Blinders with my wife last night, I also appreciated finally being able to hear treble when music started playing from the front stereo channels.
I did notice some tonal differences in speech tonight when toggling between stereo and surround on a YouTube video, but it wasn't very concerning.
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I'm not quite sure what to do with crossover settings. The subwoofer's internal crossover is disabled in LFE mode, but the Denon provides crossover frequency configuration for subwoofer, front, center, and surround stages. Calibration keeps setting the surrounds to a hilariously low 80Hz (their 4" woofers are the smallest in the set!).
For now I put everything at 120Hz, and it sounds fine. I might try looking up their specs and setting them all a bit above the highest reported low-end though.
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Looks like the minimum frequencies in the specs are:
Apparently 80Hz is the THX standard and a common recommendation, so there's no reason to go lower than that.
I'll have to play around with it.
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@HunterZ i use the THX standard crossover freq setting on my Pioneer Elite with my Monitor 7's and it sounds fine. The system refers to anything below 80hz as a "large" speaker and anything above that as a "small" speaker. While there's no real definition of large vs small, anything with a 5.5-inch driver to me is large enough to push low frequencies.
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@vga256 thanks, that's good data and sounds reasonable. My surrounds are 4 inch with a rated frequency bottom of 100Hz, so I might go with 100-120 as the crossover frequency for those.
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@HunterZ yeah, exactly. mine too.
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@HunterZ ahhh don't you love modern tech.
Half the time it works all the time!
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@Tijn
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