Where do I begin, and how can I do it without resorting to colorful expletives? Screw it.
Holy f***ing s***!
After a small amount of tweaking, most of which was with the EP600, I can honestly say that the system Dennis has assembled is the best I've ever heard in a home, possibly even better than any system I've heard anywhere, including demo rooms at high-end shops. (It's been a while since I heard those Revel Salons....) I have to admit I was a bit worried that the room would be too reverberant, given that it is tiled in marble and is flanked by a kitchen to the left and a glass patio behind. Despite the size of the space and the hardness of its surfaces, I noticed no echo or undue brightness that you'd expect from 14 (14!!) titanium tweeters firing all around you.
One negative impression Ken and I both did share when we first arrived was that the sub was obviously not dialed in properly. As we all know at this point, Dennis had other priorities (i.e. the gorgeous CD shelf, and various areas of flooring throughout the house). After listening to a few tracks on the untweaked system, Ken and I explored the C2 processor's menus and got it dialied in to where we thought it sounded best. To those interested, we set the front 3 M80s to large, the surrounds (2 QS8s and 2 M80s) to small, and set the EP600 to fill in at 60Hz and below. By default, the C2 doesn't divert bass to the sub if your mains are set to large, so we needed to enable "enhanced bass" mode. Believe me, even though the M80s produce great bass, the absence of the EP600 was immediately apparent. I also poked around on the EP600's rear panel and noticed that its boost setting was at full. After consulting the manual, we determined the recommended setting for the room size was flat. We corrected the setting and immediately noticed the resonse became much smoother. All boom literally disappeared. The EP600 is the best sub I've ever had the pleasure of hearing. Period. End of story, and it's not even being driven by a Halo.
With the system calibrated and level-matched, we threw disc after disc after disc into the Denon 2900 and were continually impressed. We discovered halfway through our listening session that the Denon hadn't been calibrated for multichannel discs yet, so we put the SPL meter to use and remedied that quickly. With SACDs, the QS8s were able to throw a wide image to either side of us and well behind us, even though they are positioned just a hair forward of the listening couch. In DTS:Neo6 mode, we noted that the front imaging remained true to the Stereo source, but just gave it an extra oomph of ambiance that we very much preferred over plain stereo. We also founf that Neo6 was clearly better than DPLIIx on most material. DPLIIx would push imaging out toward the peripheries and seemed to veil the midrange a bit.
The discs we threw in ran the gamut of genres from bluegrass to metal, classical to classic rock, and more. Everything we put in seemed to give us a new revelation. "Wow! I've never heard
that before!" was a common utterance. Notice how I have exclamation points in that comment. Very rarely did the SPLs in the room dip below 80. The more we listened, the louder we could take it. Ken held up the meter at one point and it was reading around 100db. And the speakers and amps were ao nonchalant about it. If they could talk, they'd complain about their ununsed potential and beg for more.
(Perhaps that's what Jimmy was alluding to when he thought it was a waste of money?) But you WANT unused potential. You want power in reserve. You want to KNOW that your system is capable of more than you'd ever ask of it. I'd better shut up before I talk myself into upgrading my perfectly functional Onkyo....
Last but not least, the host review. Dennis is a kind a gracious host who needed no calibrating whatsoever.
He made us feel welcome and immediately at ease in his home. He must also be very trusting because he gave us complete control of his system for the entire time we were there -- even after his bad luck with a former visitor. I am also convinced that had we stayed any longer he would have invited us to crash for the night. As good guests, we would naturally have refused politely (after thinking on it a bit
). We departed with earfuls of fantastic sound and bellies full of food -- yeah, he fed us too.
Friends, this man spent his money well.
