Done with Joan of Arc!
This is not going to be TOO long as I am emotionally tired.
After doing quite a bit of listening without ARC, I managed to make the serial port work and try it. The equipment is very nice. Every piece is of high quality (the least they can do for that kind of money!), including the microphone coming with a CD of calibration data.
Detailed information on ARC can be found on Anthem's site, but the things that are nice is that you once you measure, the data can be used to tweak a lot. For example, the default algo put my QS8 and centers to 125 and 135Hz and it sounded a bit weird (which prompted me to look at what it had done). But then, all I had to do is to go back to the software and just say nah! recompute everything with a x-over max 100hz. You can also pick the range of frequency to play with (it can be used for <200hz bass only) for someone wanting to minimize the impact.
You can also configure room gain and some other stuff that I did not even bother to look at. And then you can see (and by "you" I mean "I" and only "I") the graph for each speaker (old, ideal, final).
So far, so good. I watched Star Trek and listened to about two hours of music and I have not turned it off... but I did change the initial xover as it sounded hollow. But after changed twice the room gain (to check how much it affected), it might actually be better. The good thing with the d2 is that each source can be set to room eq on/off so I can program two sources with the same info and just room eq off.
But this is for much later!
Pictures...
1. The ARC comes in a nice separate box
2. The pieces on the couch
3. The microphone mounted (the base is under the pillows to make it at ear level). There's a nice clip to make it easy to have a straight-up mic
