How many listening positions did you use in your Audyssey calibaration?
I recently did the $100 upgrade and then reran Audyssey with either 5 or 6 listening positions. It worked much better this time than when I first purchased my 3808.
I like the sound with Audyssey turned off fine but the sound in my room is much better with it on, after the latest upgrade and running audyssey again.
After the upgrade you will have new setting you can use.
The Dynamic EQ, you can turn on some music and then turn in On and Off and see how you like it best.
Also the Dynamic Volume is pretty nice. You can turn it off or on using Midnight, Evening or Day. When watching something at night and not wanting to disturb anyone trying to sleep I find this feature very nice.
Oh yeah, I run my crossovers at Fronts - mostly 60 but sometimes 40, center - 90, surrounds 90 and sub 80 because as someone mentioned above, you don't too much coming out of the sub as to notice it's part of the system. Great sounding bass without being able to tell where it is coming from is what you want.
If you think the volume is too low just hit the button on the remote that shows the levels onscreen and bump 'em all up a bit.
When I first upgraded to new speakers, sub, BD and 3808 I agonized over all this stuff until everyone told me to just play with everything until it sounds best to me. If your levels are low and you think -18 is too high to have to run it then just raise the levels
If you look through some old posts you'll probably see me driving people crazy with all kinds of questions. They finally got me to take a deep breath and "play" with everything.
If you completely screw everything up you just rerun your Audyssey and start again.
The $100 upgrade did quite a bit for my sound, probably because of upgraded Audyssey stuff, not sure, but doing the FW upgrade that had to be done before you could apply the Feature upgrade hosed my HDMI connection from my Cox cable box, Scientific Atlanta 8300. Been running fine for months but after the upgrade I noticed my 56" Samsung had a small picture, not an edge to edge Hi Def picture I've always had. Cox box showed 480. If I turned off the Denon and cable box, turned on cable box it would aquire a 1080i signal. I then would turn on the Denon and have edge to edge hi def again, until I changed channels then it would bounce back to a small picture and say 480. Denon said "the upgrade had nothing to do with that". Very nicely I explained that my entire system had worked perfectly together for months, even after a previous Denon firmware ugrade and the problem started at the very instance the latest firmware upgrade finished. You know, the old "we'll just say it couldn't be us" and the customer is stuck with it. I finally just removed the HDMI from cable to denon and replaced with component cables. Now I have my high def back 100% of the time. It seems something they did to the HDMI handshaking caused the problem. Actually the first denon rep named 'Paul' tried to argue with me and then when he told me he would transfer me to another rep, he hung up on me. Went back on hold for another 25 minutes and the next rep "Kevin" was respectful but neither was really very good at what they were supposed to be doing. I've enjoyed my denon so far but I'll probably look for a different brand with a better service reputation when I upgrade again.
It must make for some interesting effects when you forget to check adjstments before playing music.
