Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Gift idea

While I was not so gung-ho for the 1019 vs. the older 1018 for which it was supposed to be an upgrade, the Elite 21 gets my approval (for what it's worth). That receiver is the appropriate replacement for the 1018, too bad they stamped it Elite, and adjusted the price accordingly (I also don't like that Pioneer doesn't allow their Elite line to be sold online). Hope you found a good deal.

Sounds like what Denon did with the number change up, the 3310 replaces the lower 2809 and the 4310 replaced the 3808 but the prices are not the same. The 4310 is now in the 4308 price range and the 3310 took the 3808 price point meaning slightly less quality for the same money .

I bought it yesterday at (yikes!) Best Buy. Good deal? no, but at least they gave me 10% off, for what that's worth. So I paid about $630.00 plus tax.

Best Buy/Magnolia is one of the few places normal people can find the Pioneer Elite line, and considering list for that receiver is $800, that's not too bad.

In Europe, Pioneer doesn't have as large a distribution network, so they don't place restrictions on what would be Elite here. The items get slightly different product numbers to make them look like their just higher models of the regular range. There's more competition between sellers, and with that the lower prices it brings.

Last night, I gave my son and his wife the Pioneer receiver (vsx-819H-k) and the Axiom M3's.

He loved it, but I'm not sure about the wife. Her comment was "If you play those loud, I'm going to put on the Mamma Mia musical and Charlotte's Web and me and the baby are going to boogie to them really loud." LOL.

Not sure why we couldn't get the MCACC auto eq to work. This receiver is somewhat different than mine, and I didn't have the time to play with it much. Upon pushing the Receiver button, then the Setup button (lower left), no menu on the TV would pop up. He's off today and will probably figure it out. (The mic was plugged in).

Mamma Mia!! haha! what a nice gift...the M3's and 819H-k, I mean.

Plugging the mic in when the receiver is on, should put it automatically into MCACC setup. If nothing is being displayed on the TV, have a look at the display on the receiver, it should say something like "Auto MCACC". That'll at least let you know the receiver is doing it's thing. Then you can figure out why the GUI isn't showing up on the TV. Check the connections from the receiver to the TV. I'm not sure the GUI is enabled for all of them; I know it does it over HDMI for sure.

I called my son up and asked him how he liked the M3's and he said that he loved them.

One problem we had was with getting the OSD (on screen display) to work with MCACC. Then I noticed at the bottom of the page that describes this in small print it said that OSD was passed along to the TV using component instead of HDMI connections. Now it works fine with a component connection for just the MCACC OSD.

That's really odd, my older, non-Elite does OSD over HDMI. It looks like an old DOS program, and is only 480p, but it does show up.

Just another one of those things they drop off the lower models or previous model year to year to force you to buy the higher end new models for that one feature you really want.