oppo dvd audio? (1 Viewer)

[JeremyErwin]

I just got my oppo dv971h dvd player. Fine DVD player. It also supports dvd-audio-- so I got my first dvd-audio disc today "best of REM"-- more to find out what the fuss was about than anything else.

I can't seem to figure out the oppo's settings for multichannel audio. On my receiver, I have it set so that the rears are 4 ft away, the center and fronts 7ft away. But on the Oppo. the distances can only be set for rears and center. Aaaghh! Also, is there a crossover setting?

I have a Onkyo-TX-SR502 receiver.

 

[LanceJ]

Jeremy: I have no idea of this particular player's internal workings, but for the high resolution tracks, most sacd/dvd and dvd-audio players under @$800 seem to have either strange, half-assed bass management/distance systems (with crossovers stuck at 120Hz; the LFE channel gets trashed if "no sub" is chosen; etc), or NONE at all (the b.m./distance settings apply only to the Dolby/DTS signals).

This bass management weirdness is why I started experimenting with my own 5.1 music system and now no longer use b.m. for it and am happy with the results. As I said on another forum recently, the lower bass notes are only one part of the music/movie listening experience and I'm not going to let the possibility of imperfect bass keep me from enjoying the ENTIRE surround experience. And anyway, there is no such thing as Perfect Bass in the first place.

BUT: if you DON'T use large bookshelf speakers that can handle bass flat to below 50Hz like I do for my left/right/center/rear channels, then you might have a problem.

As far as the lack of front speaker distance settings, the engineers might be using the concept of relativity so to speak, where the fronts are the reference points and the other speakers' distance settings are measured in relation to the fronts (some receiver's automatic setting systems do something similar). In other words, if the fronts are 10ft from you, and the rears are 7ft from you, then that 3ft difference is what you program the player with. Because AFAIK distance circuits are really just electronic delays and when you program a player/receiver/whatever with certain "distance" numbers, the circuit's software is really just looking at the relative difference between each setting to make sure each signal arrives at your ear at the same time. In other words: the electronic delays for the above system are the same as for a system with front mains 30ft away from you and rear channels that are 21ft from you. Make sense?

 

[JeremyErwin]

relative distance. ok, it sort of makes sense now. Now that it's a saner hour to be fiddling about with a subwoofer, I'll experiment.