So my movie watching plans got all shot to hell when I went to buy a VGA and HDMI cable at Fry’s and ended up bringing home an Onkyo TX-NR3007. Have to say so far I’m very impressed and between the Oppo BDP-83, Panasonic AE4000 and now this I have way to many new toys to play with and hopefully review.
First impression on the Ohkyo is that It’s heavy. Following that the next thing I noticed is that It was extremely easy to set up compared to my Denon. If you stay with the presets for inputs it pretty much sets up itself. 6 HDMI inputs means I can ditch the HDMI switch.
It auto detects the Audyssey mic being plugged in and loads the calibration screen. Took about 30 minutes to run the setup for 7.1. It set my L/R M80s to 40Hz, my center M80 to 50Hz and all 4 QS8s to 100 Hz.
I put in the usual movies/music I test with and immediately noticed that unlike my Denon this time Audyssey didn’t make my speakers sound like crap. At first I really couldn’t tell if Audyssey was doing anything until I got to some bass heavy scenes and clearly noticed how it smoothed out the bass. From what I’ve heard so far I feel no need to even check the auto setup with my SPL meter as it sounds that good. Based on the auto setup and Audyssey plus how Dolby PLIIx sounds on the Onkyo I can only assume something in my Denon is, as I suspected, defective. Actually the impressiveness of the sound from the Onkyo reminds me of how the Denon sounded when I first got it. So I’m suspecting something happened to it.
As for the Panasonic AE4000 I determined that the frame creation feature is in fact working. During an early scene in the 2001 Blu-ray as a satellite moves across the screen there was a lot motion judder. When I turned on the frame creation it just sailed smoothly across the screen. I’m still not sure if I’m noticing the hyper vividness people complain about. If I am seeing it it’s not always happening but seems to come and go.
I’m now running in eco-mode for all inputs not just the computers. I tried out high altitude mode and could clearly hear the fan running, however under normal operation I don’t hear the fan from my listening position about 4-5 feet away. I bumped up the brightness a little bit as some scenes seemed a little dark lacking some shadow detail. A nice surprise was that it didn’t effect the VGA output a problem I had on my HDTV where to get the brightness right for the DVD input it made things to bright for the computers so I then had to calibrate them separately using the video card.
