I spent basically all evening tinkering with the SC-05. I have a few more thoughts to share....
I spent a good bit of time reading through the manual to try to better understand how the MCACC (Pioneer's version of Audyssey) works. I ended up re-doing the setup a few times, and tinkered with the different types of calibrations in the more advanced setup options. Fascinating stuff. Especially the pre-and-post calibration system response graphs. That's pretty cool. I'm reasonably impressed by the SQ improvements, but not blown away. Yes, I used a tripod and followed the instructions to the letter. Keep in mind, this is my first time with an auto-setup system. I'm used to calibrating my speakers with the trusty rat-shack SPL meter and just by ear.
It's like sometimes I think that it's helping, and sometimes I think that it's hurting. Even from song-to-song (CD or lossless AAC's via AppleTV), I'll hear one song and thing, 'hmmm, something's off with the midrange - too warm, too fuzzy, muffled', and I'll flip MCACC off and it'll sound amazing again. Then the next song will sound a bit too harsh & sterile, or have no 'presence' to the music, and I'll flip MCACC back on and it'll sound amazing again. Anyone with an Audyssey-based system experience this? Is this just bringing out details in my music that I haven't heard before? I'd almost buy that, except that these are the same songs that I've listened to dozens of times before both on the home system and via my good headphones + amp, and I've never experienced changes like that.
And then there are all of the sound modes. Certainly, the froo-froo ones like 'Hall' and 'Dance Club' are junk. But it seems that, again, with every song I need to flip between 'Stereo', 'Direct' & 'Pure Direct' just to find the optimal sound. I understand and appreciate the differences between what they do, but it's somewhat annoying that I can't just set-it-and-forget-it. It's fantastic in the sense that I can coax *amazing* SQ out of my music, seemingly every time. But not so fantastic in that I have to futz with it to make that happen.
To be fair, I am being pretty critical here. The SQ is never bad. I am impressed with the SQ overall. It's just seems that sometimes its not as great as it could be.
I did hook up the SACD player last night and fired up a few albums. Quite impressive. SQ is phenomenal. Listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons by Janine Jansen gave me goosebumps at times. Incredibly lush and clean, for as loud as I want to go. Truly, my M80's have never sounded this good. Very alive and real. Interestingly, the SC-05 can apply the MCACC to the analog inputs, which surprised me. Unsurprisingly, I almost universally did *not* like how it changed the music and mostly just left it off. Another big positive is that it has a +10db sub correction setting on the analog inputs. I've struggled with my SACD player before because the sub output is always too low (and it can only trim negative), which usually results in some pretty weird trim calibrations to get it to sound right. With the SC-05 and that setting, it's darn near perfect, with no tweaking required. Excellent! Of course, if I just broke down and bought an Oppo 980H and did DSD/PCM via HDMI, that problem would go away.
But then that uncovers the first somewhat significant quirk. The 'soundfield' settings (MCACC, hi-bit sampling, tone controls, speaker trims, etc) are global. I would have thought they'd be individual to each source, but they're not. Bummer. So changing sources involves more than just tapping a button. If I keep the SC-05, I'm going to have to set up macros on my Harmony to reset the parameters each time.
The Onkyo 876 is scheduled to arrive today, and I'm looking forward to putting it through its paces tonight!
