Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions

My Sunfire receiver arrived Monday afternoon. I didn't get it in place until late, so I haven't had it to really high levels yet, but I did get a chance to breeze through select parts of a few DVDs. Since it was late, I don't have a lot of comments on the amplifier yet, except that I'm certain there's much more headroom than what was available from the Yamaha it replaced. I'm very happy with how little heat it generates, and the face and case are nice. I like the huge blue display, the lettering can easily be read from 15 feet away (a problem with the Yamaha was that the display was almost illegible from the listening position). I'm not thrilled with all the orange lighted buttons that are on all of the time, but I'll give it a few days looks-wise; it might just be the stark contrast to the Yasmaha it replaced. The remote is a URC MX-500, with which I'm familiar and enjoy for its simplicity, speed, hard buttons, and effective (and easy to engage) backlighting.

It's driving M80 mains, VP150 center, and Polk RT600i surrounds. There's a trio of QS-8's ready to replace the RT600i's, but I haven't had time to wire them yet. Sunfire True Subwoofer Signature, with the receiver crossover (global) at 60Hz for the moment and all speakers set to large.

One thing I noticed is that the subwoofer output is much lower than it was from the Yamaha. This is a good thing; the Yamaha output was so hot that I had to crank it down and run the subwoofer gain at near nil, which made it touchy to adjust.

I have read a complaint or two about noise levels, but I've had no audible noise problems. However, I haven't listened to plain old CD yet.

Ay any rate, with the Axioms, I've now got the headroom I needed in this room (and it looks like plenty to spare) for movies. The DSP also seems to be better than the Yamaha it replaced, at least in terms of DD and DTS. The Yamaha had more useful miscellaneous soundfields (Cinema DSP is good as far as these things go), but I never used them for audio and only rarely for stereo TV enhancement. I don't think I'll miss them.

Kudos to Sunfire for packing a wallop in a box that only weighs 35 lbs. and doesn't heat my family room. It looks miniscule compared to the Denon AVR5803, and combined with the MX-500 remote the WAF is very high. Kudos to them making their RS-232 control codes public too; I'm almost done with rudimentary control software.

You forgot to mention that it's the sexiest looking receiver in the price point!

Is the receiver male or female?

Compared to the competitors, I'd have to say it's female due to it's lack of unnecessary bulk. :-)

As far as sexiness goes... I like the case a lot, but I still don't like the gazillion orange lights that are always on. It looks better turned off than on, which to me is odd for a receiver. It'd be nice if the non-indicator lights could be turned off or on a timer (say 10 seconds after use of the front panel). However, considering how well it has worked out for me, I can overlook the orange lights. There are uglier things in my rack (ancient VCR that hasn't been used in over a year, for example). I shouldn't need a new receiver in the family room for a very long time.

The one thing it's missing... pre-out/main-in loop. I miss having the DSP8024 in the loop for 2-channel sources. Maybe it's time to burn all my CDs to mp3 and get the AES/EBU I/O option for the DSP8024 and just stick it between digital out on the HTPC and the receiver input.

Re: sexiest...
Hmm... But the front surface is, well, soooo flat! :-)

Re: orange lights...
What do they actually indicate?

Re: mp3...
At what bit rate would you consider it acceptable for "hi-fi" listening? Is the variable bit rate better or worse? How about the joint-stereo?

In reply to:

---

At what bit rate would you consider it acceptable for "hi-fi" listening?

---

I can tell the difference usually, but a 320kbps MP3 DOES do a pretty good job. 256 VBR is pretty good too. Below that...

In reply to:

---

Is the variable bit rate better or worse?

---

Define better or worse. It will result in a smaller file with largely equivalent sound quality to a higher bitrate file.

Oh, and ALWAYS encode with EAC + LAME!

I wouldn't consider an mp3 format given the choice. The Ogg vorbis is a better compressor.

I think the "LAME" encoding really needs a new name.

Good One !

I agree with you regarding MP3, Chess, but he asked about MP3 so I answered. HDD space is so cheap now, that I'm actually planning on ripping all of my CD's losslessly. but Ogg would be my choice if I wanted lossy compression.

The problem here is that ogg is essentially a waste of time but for my PCs. We have multiple mp3 CD players at home, one in my car (and soon one in a second car), and a couple of iPods (the old 20G and the new 30G). Hence I use mp3; it makes my life (and my wife's) a heck of a lot easier. There's no shortage of disk space here; my entire mp3 collection uses a small fraction of the 600G RAID array in the basement (480G usable space). There's more than another half terabyte of disk space on other machines at home. Disk is cheap.

Re. bitrate, there are a lot of factors. One is the source material, a second is the target listening environment, another is the encoder (some are better than others), For my car (Alpine CDA-7878, Alpine MRD-F752, MB Quart components, Sunfire subwoofer), for example, 160kpbs with a good encoder sounds very good for most material. It's a convertible, so the noise floor is quite high. But it sounds great when I have the hardtop on too. Less dyanmic range can actually be a good thing here too, due to the high noise floor. On the highway in traffic, the noise floor is at least 80dB if I'm near a truck. You can guess what kind of hearing problems I'd have (and power and capacitors I'd need) if I wanted 80dB of usable dynamic range in such a situation. There are times I wish I had a compressor in the car (wall-to-wall concrete corridors, for example, where rolling up the windows has little effect). Classical music is unlistenable if I have the top down and I'm on the highway. I could compress the heck out of it before encoding, but that takes most of the life out of it and would ruin it when I have the top up.

For the family room, 160kbps is not so good. 192kbps and above is quite good, and 256kbps is indistinguishable from the source for most of my music (assuming a good encoder). But in the family room, I've also got the option of just listening to the original when I want full fidelity. In the car, well, it's tiny and I don't have room to carry a zillion CDs (2-seater, trunk is tiny). I won't give up mp3 CD in my car. Any hard-disk type device would have problems in my car (extreme temperature changes, from below 0F to 100F or more), mp3 CD is the perfect solution for me and my head unit works very well. My next head unit is the Alpine CDA-7998, also an mp3 CD unit. For the most part I've avoided VBR, not because it's worse but because some hardware players don't handle it (they look at the bitrate in the first frame and assume that's the bitrate for the entire file :-(; lord knows what other stuff they're igonring in the frame header, whether or not they lose their minds on corrupted files, etc.).

I'd say WMA is more useful than ogg too, becuase it's more widely supported on non-PC devices. I personally have no interest whatsoever in Microsoft-suppiled codecs, and not a single WMA file.

Make no mistake, ogg is superior to mp3. It's just not supported in consumer audio gear, leaving it relegated to PCs (and I don't see that changing soon, if ever).

The orange lights aren't indicators at all, they're lighted buttons. There are 19 of them on the face, and they're always lit. I basically never use the front panel (instead use the remote), so it's essentially useless to me. Doe anyone actually use the front panel on a receiver very often, especially when an MX-500 is included with it? I'm not sure, but I suspect that 11 of the lighted buttons only do something for the tuner... they're 0-9 and a +10 button. I think we could all live without those buttons, or at least without them glowing bright orange. :-)

Definitely the first receiver I've owned that looks better when turned off than when turned on. :-) Not a major gripe, it's just the oddball. But the indicator lights (sorround mode, etc.) are a nice blue. They should have stuck with blue for all of the lights or inverted the color scheme (blue for the buttons that are always lit, orange for indicator lights).

How about the AAC? Is it better or worse than the other formats discussed?

Point well taken.
mp3s are mainstream while ogg has just not caught on.
I've made exactly 2 audio cds in my lifetime, so i'm not exactly a poster child for the RIAA criminal hunt.
Those were both mp3 based but all tracks were ripped by me at 256.
They sound fine in the car but certainly the home theatre setup can really discern between the mp3 and original. That added environmental noise just destroys the whole listening experience. I hate my car audio now that i've been spoiled with something so much better.

Sushi,

Assuming your uses were similar to dwm's, and then aac would stend ill be a poor choice compared to MP3 as it's not that well supported at the moment. You're basically relegated to the iPod and computers plus there is the limitation of DRM (not as bad as most but not as good as ogg or MP3 either). Sound quality comparisons I've read seem to all indicate that aac falls inbetween ogg and MP3.

"HDD space is so cheap now, that I'm actually planning on ripping all of my CD's losslessly..."

Remember that CDs are lossy to begin with. :P

Well, I can always hook up my iPod to the receiver as an "endless" juke box for a party. That is one of the reasons why I asked the question; another reason is, of course, my endless curiosity.