It pays to calibrate (1 Viewer)

[Jim Williams]

I feel really dumb. About a month ago I was all set to upgrade from my 6 month old Onkyo 601 to something different. I was disappointed with the quality of the sound. I don't know how to explain it other than it sounded flat or harsh. Because other things came up (my wife suggested that we get a digital camera) the money I had for a new receiver was no longer available. Today I suddenly remembered that about two months ago I made some changes to my speaker set-up and although I re-calibrated the sound levels, I failed to check the phase. As soon as I got home I popped in my Avia disk and checked the phase all around. Sure enough the surround speakers were out of phase and the left and right front and surrounds were out of phase too. Once I corrected this I put in disk one of the Two Towers EE and was blown away at how much better everything sounded and how dumb I must be.

The moral of the story is: calibrate - calibrate - calibrate. It just might save you some money.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

I know how you feel. I spent an entire weekend trying to find out why my new IB sub wasn't generating much SPL only to learn that I'd reversed the polarity on the banana plug on the power amp:b