Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Audyssey EQ

Still completely loving the Audyssey on the 3808, sorry for mixing up the internet music feature with Rhapsody in previous posts, new to the 3808 so it took me a minute to recognize which features were new and which were new only to me. Just wanted to share my impressions again, inchoate as they may be, the word that definitely has stuck in my mind is "shimmering" which I suppose is a visual metaphor for sound, the point being that what Audyssey seems to add in my room is more transparency and clarity to the HFs, not sure exactly which frequency range as looking at the graphs a number are boosted depending upon speaker, e.g., 1k, 5k, 10k. Even though I spend more time listening to HT, mostly it's the sheer musicality that floats my boat about the sound, didn't BoB say, "hey where are the cymbals" and I sort of wondered the same thing when I first plugged in the M80s (cymbals decay too fast?), even though on balance I loved them without reservation, and personally recall complaining about wind sounding insufficient; tonight listening to the raindrops in CSI and all kinds of wind, bells, and sounds in the same range were just delicious.

Needless to say Audyssey as configured also solves the sometimes cited problem of the VP150 seeming subtly muffled and therefore helps with dialogue, but the real gain to me is in the greater seeming authenticity to actual sound, it's by no means a cheesy effect, and is increasing the joy I receive from the Axioms to a considerable degree, the best sound I have ever been priveleged to experience in my home is even that much better. It's also cool that the right M80 sounds better even with the vent behind it and has a considerably different EQ curve.

As per the feature upgrade, it was free for me but I would have purchased it anyway, having been a Rhapsody subscriber since 2005, hey I love renting music, after all the money I've poured down the drain on LPs that were stolen by my college roommate's younger brother, cassette tapes, and scratched/misplaced/ill purchased (one good song) CDs, but of course there may be few in my boat with regard to the benefit of that particular feature, make up playlists online and play them back at leisure.

I find it fascinating that Dean doesn't like standard Audyssey despite multiple tries whereas to me it is a genius feature, which surprised me because I never expected with wood floors that I would need a series of HF boosts, somewhere they get lost and perhaps someone will inform me about the overall reflective process, anyhow there appear to be a number of subjective or situational variables at play.

Jason clearly has been incredibly diligent and a lot more diligent than me with regard to audio calibration and that may be the reason he is making good use of the Dynamic EQ, as appear to be a majority (?) of others, as well as Dynamic Volume; however, for me both features squash or compress the sound, and remind me of the way back version, a Loudness control, that sort of sounds good when you turn it on but is artificial sounding and seems to interfere with authentic reproduction, so I always turn such effects off, because they are too limiting and unidmensional in implementation, if you will.

The other possibility is that in my medium to large room I can increase the overall volume to the extent that I don't require any form of compression to mimic a larger volume so it may be less useful to me, the tradeoff tilts to an overall loss on balance rather than a gain. So there are two main possibilities so far in my mind: 1) I don't have the expertise at this stage to get the basic Audyssey curve up to speed to support the new features, or 2) it's just not a benefit in my room given my listening habits (moderate to loud).

It's intriguing to me as to what's actually going on with Audyssey because it seems to actually work, and work well, however, the main thing is I am experiencing a quantum leap in sound reproduction with 3808/Audyssey just by following a simple recipe known as auto setup, and that's a very good thing, because time is at a premium, and there's no guarantee I would figure this out anyway, or as JohnK always likes to say, to paraphrase wildly, it's more likely that I would bungle it by ear than accidentally get it right.

Oh, and Audyssey is definitely not about fullness (or loudness) for me, it’s about clarity: the soundtrack becomes crystal clear with excellent dynamic range even at moderate volumes, and I don’t have to crank up the volume just to make the dialogue more discernable or the background sounds more impactful or vivid.