Anyone every hook a PC up to MCACC (Pioneer) AVR?

With a recent push towards bettering my home theater, I starting looking deeper into the capabilities of my Pioneer Elite VSX-54TX receiver. I found out that I can do some fairly serious graphing of my room accoustics by connecting the receiver to a PC using the RS-232 port on the back of the receiver.

Anyway, I am wondering if anyone has done this before? The RS-232 port seems to just connect up to a 9-pin COM port on a PC (my laptop has one), and I have the software from Pioneer already downloaded.

Anyway, here is what it says about the cable in the manual:

Originally Posted By: Pioneer Manual

Use a commercially-available RS-232C cable to connect the RS-232C jack on your computer to the 9-pin RS-232C jack on the back panel of this receiver (the cable must be cross type, female–female).

So by "cross type," does that mean a "cross-over" or "null-modem" cable, or is it just a regular 9-pin serial cable?

I used to have a 25' cross-over null-modem cable from WAY back when I used to play multi-player games (locally) on two computers before LAN gaming and internet gaming, but I must have thrown it out as I couldn't find it. I need to buy some other cables and such from monoprice, so I want to get a cable for this too from them so that I don't have to pay RatShack's crazy prices....

Any ideas as to which type it is?

They mean a null-modem cable.

Cool. Thanks!

Oooh! Aaah! There's a geekfest I can get behind. Let us know how that works.

What function do you get?

My 45TX has USB. I hooked it up to my Mac Mini and I was able to output iTunes via USB. Sound was actually quite good.

I should be able to perform an advanced room/speaker testing and calibration, and output all of it to a PC via the port.

Ah. Actually, that sounds pretty cool.

Nick,

If you already have a regular serial cable, you can just get yourself a null modem adapter.

I used to use them all the time back when I was hooking up dumb terminals to Unix systems.

Yeah, I had a 9-pin F to 9-pin M cable (25 foot) with both a gender-changing adaptor and a null-modem adaptor, but I can't find any of it. They are pretty cheap to get an entire cable from monoprice in case I don't find it in the last place that I just thought to look (when I get home)...

Originally Posted By: nickbuol

Yeah, I had a 9-pin F to 9-pin M cable (25 foot) with...a gender-changing adaptor

They finally made that legal?

Only in some states...