HK 635 ordered - owners, anything cool to tell me? (1 Viewer)

[Kenneth Harden]

I have spent a fair bit of time on the HK site reading the manual, looking at pics, etc.

The Sony I have now is, ummm, 'light' on features, and this HK looks like it is FILLED with lots of USEFUL stuff.

Anything cool to know?

I wear headphones a lot and am looking foward to trying out some of the different modes.

The auto calibration is rated well (by you guys), so I look foward to that.

Most of all, my sensitive, efficent Klipsch's are looking foward to clean, quality power.

I am stoked.

Sony STR-DE675 -> Harman Kardon AVR 635

 

[Steve Schaffer]

A coupla suggestions:

1-the auto-eq is a two stage process, involving far field and near field measurements. The manual states that for the far field adjustment you should place the microphone approximately a meter (about a yard) above the normal ear position at the listening position. The manual and the onscreen menu also disagree as to where to set the volume before running the auto eq.

Most have gotten the best results by placing the mic at ear level rather than a meter above, especially if the surrounds or back surrounds are relatively close to the listening position and/or mounted fairly high.

One also gets best results by setting volume to -28db before running the auto eq.

The near field measurement involves holding the mic about a yard in front of the fronts and center speakers individually, with the mic pointed at the speaker, sounds cumbersome but the onscreen instructions and manual are pretty clear about the procedure.

You may find that the receiver picks "large" and "small" for the various speakers differently from what you would normally do. If you go back in and manually change things you will be told to do the auto eq again. Some of your manual resets may or may not "stick" after redoing the auto eq.

My advice would be to try what the receiver picks first--really give it a good listen on various dvds and cds. You may find that you really like the sound even if the speaker size selection doesn't quite jive with conventional wisdom.

The other thing I can advise is to run the auto eq with the room as close to totally silent as possible, turn off the fridge if you can hear it at all from your listening room and make sure any central heat or ac is off. I've used 4 different auto-eq receivers so far and the HK is really sensitive to ambient noises when doing the auto eq. clicking noises especially mess things up.

You'll get the best results as far as assigning inputs if you have the source device turned on during the process. The manual is none to clear on this process so having the source on is very helpful. If you're not using both analog and digital audio connections for any given source, be sure to turn "auto-polling" off for that source.

Don't mess with changing the default front display brightness settings until after you've done the auto eq. When the front display dims after the selected fadeout time there's a click which throws off the auto eq process every time.

This all sounds rather forbidding but it's not really. Once set up the box is quite easy and instinctive to use and produces really nice sound.

 

[Kenneth Harden]

Cool, thanks for the tips!

Yeah, I was wondering about doing the auto-eq, and then doing some manual stuff (speaker size)

Left Maspath, NY a few hours ago. 3,000 miles and it is mine!

 

[Himanshu_S]

Another thing I liked about this receiver is that you can adjust the crossovers for your front speakers. Since you have the F3's which can handle down to 40, you can choose to do so with this receiver.

Turning off the lights completely on the receiver is a great option and I think should be standard on all HT equipment.

After my friend ran the auto setup, I used the SPL meter to see the levels of the speakers. The rears were off but it sounded better like that than making the levels equal. Don't know why but that was strange.

The good thing about the auto setup is that it only takes few seconds instead of minutes on my yamaha 5790.