I'm sure Tom et al. are researching it. It would be interesting to see if other Class D amps also have this problem or whether it is unique to the design of the a-1400-8. Regardless, running Audessey should not be a worry for anyone owning this amp.
As for the market going all auto setup and equalization, I doubt that is right. I know Audessey likes to talk that up but I've checked out those programs many times in many different HT systems. I can say every one was screwed up and sounded better without the Audessey settings.
A few years ago I was quite intrigued with them and had long chats with the Anthem engineers about why they were not using auto-equalization in their excellent processors. I was looking at the D1 at the time. Anthem's extensive research showed much the same thing as my observations. All too often listeners percieve a momentary audible change in FR in room as somehow improving sound quality. The basic problem with Audessey and other programs stems from the fact that no receiver/processor around today has the computational power required to run enough iterations while running sweeps. The auto programs that come close are those pro programs that rely on powerful desktop computers and require an hour or so to find optimal settings. That doesn't happen in a receiver auto setup.
To make matters worse, those auto programs introduce considerable phase problems. So you go from having well designed speaker FR and dealing with natural room acoustics to electronically induced aberrations in FR and screwed up time domain. No thanks.
I remain hopeful one day there will be an auto-setup program that gets it right. With the increasing power of small chips that may happen sooner rather than later but its not available today.
