Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Dadgum SACD

So I finally went and got the Dark Side of the Moon SACD. I have a few beefs. First of all, and this is my own stupidity, I was getting only the surrounds and center plus sub, and it took me half the album to realize I had somehow hit the "Speakers" button and toggled the B outputs. Now, on to the SACD:

1) I had just become happy with my system, now I find myself moving and recalibrating things for the SACD to sound right. I'm going to have to program some macros into my MX-700 so I don't have to tweak things manually. Luckily my QS-8s are on stands so I can move them behind my listening position, they sound better there for SACD than on the side.

2) I love bass as much as the next guy, but where does the 5.1 engineer get off adding those super low transients where they don't exist in the stereo version? Maybe I'll get used to them, but I am intimately familiar with the stereo versions, from vinyl to the original cd tranfer to the digital remaster. These LFE's muddy the sound in parts, IMHO.

These are just quick opinions after 3 listens, only 1.5 of which were just sitting and listening as opposed to tweaking and troubleshooting my own mistakes.

>>Luckily my QS-8s are on stands so I can move them behind my listening position, they sound better there for SACD than on the side.

Someone suggested recently that the best trick was to go with 7.1 and wire the SACD player's signals to mains, center and rears (not surrounds). Place the rears in a good compromise spot for music and HT then when you play 5.1 media the sound automatically comes out of the right places.

So obvious in hindsight but a great idea.

Interesting idea. I've been pondering 7.1 anyway. I had thought (or hoped) that I could just throw in the SACD and everything would be fine, or close to fine. HT/Home Audio is like following the rabbit down the hole sometimes.

Fiddlin' around last night on the 2805. Found a setting: "Ext. in Subwoofer level." It was set to +15db by default. Changing this to +5 took care of many of the things that I referred to originally. I now withdraw with tail betwixt legs.

Yeah, that's really irritating about the Denons. They seem to set the 5.1 inputs at different default levels than everything else. Even when you're using DenonLINK and not the 5.1 analog inputs, and you've calibrated on DVD-V (same input!), there's the SACD/DVD-A in sitting there, taunting you with +12 all around and -5 on the sub.

I had to make the exact same subwoofer level reduction of 10db on my 3805 to get SACD to sound correct.

However, I haven't gone back yet and checked how DVD-A has been affected. The disk I had sounded fine with the original setting. Unfortunately, my player is out for repair at the moment so I have to wait awhile to check.

I've set my system up with 7.1 as Bridgman mentions and it works really nice. Here's a thread that details the connection if needed.

Thanks for the tip on the 7.1 thread. I also started mucking about with my SACD player and found there is individual attenuation for each channel. So now I have that tuned, and recalibrated the 2805 with the Avia disk for movies, so I don't have to fiddle about with levels when switching between the two. What a relief!