First I have to give a shout out to Doug at SVS Tech support for corresponding with me this weekend over an issue I seemed to be having. Not many companies or people offer that sort of service so it deserves recognition.
Well might as well get the issue mentioned. After the first spectacular run of the AS-EQ1 in the single center seat I ran it the next day across all three seats getting almost no improvement notable by meter or ear. I ran it about 10 more times in the single center seat trying to recreate the first results and continued to get almost no improvement. This morning I tried again in the single center seat and once again near perfection. Liking the results I was almost afraid to try 3 seats again. This time the 3 seat run came out quite well. I have no idea what was going on. I know the sound of my system after listening and tweaking almost every week for a year and can clearly hear when the EQ is working well and when it’s off or not working well so I don’t think this was any sort of post calibration measurement anomaly though I could be wrong. I was probably just screwing something up and got it corrected w/o realizing what I was doing. But for now I’m going to leave well enough alone until I get a chance to have Sean come over.
So how did it do this time? Well for the single seat it once again took a 19dB range (e.g. +/-9.5dB) and reduced it to just over 4dB (e.g. +/-2dB). Try to tell me you can’t hear the difference in that.
For the 3 seat run I used only 8 of the 32 measurement positions this time since I was also comparing it to what the Audyssey in my Onkyo could do so I used the same 8 positions called for in the Onkyo manual. (Note: this is not the ideal way to run the AS-EQ1 which suggests using measurements 2 feet apart over the seating area with around 18 or so being a good number as above that you get diminishing returns. I will redo the 3 seat single row and 2 row measurements using the optimal configuration.
As I expected it didn’t do quite at well as the single seat since it has to average out for a wider area, about 9 feet across (I have big chairs). In this case it took the 19dB range of the center seat and brought it down to 10dB. The 20dB range of the left seat was brought down to 12dB and the 19dB range of the right seat was brought down to 14dB. Remember this was not an optimal use of the AS-EQ1 but a test to see how it performed with the same inputs as the EQ on my Onkyo.
Clearly not as good as calibrating a single seat but that was expected. Hopefully I can have Sean come over soon so we can hook up his subs and do a test with his matching subs and then a mismatch of my EP500 and one of his. My understanding is that the real strength of the AS-EQ1 is calibrating 2 subwoofers at the same time.
As a comparison I ran the Audyssey EQ on my Onkyo in just the center seat and it reduced the normal 19dB range down to 11dB whereas the AS-EQ1 took it down to a 4dB range. When I ran the Onkyo’s EQ over all 3 seats it took the center seat range down from 19dB to 14dB whereas the AS-EQ1 brought it down to 10dB. I forgot to measure the outer two seats for the Onkyo but the AS-EQ1 also did noticeably better than the Onkyo there too.
I also ran the Onkyo’s EQ in conjunction with the AS-EQ1. Actually you just run the AS-EQ1 and then the Onkyo’s one after another with the AS-EQ1 in the chain to the subwoofer. Very simple to do. The Onkyo set the trim level for the sub at +.5 which is exactly what the AS-EQ1 was suggesting. I can’t compare the distances since the Onkyo set the distance to 30 feet (the max) while the AS-EQ1 suggested 32 feet. I did the same as before and adjusted the other speaker distance to compensate for the 2 extra feet of the subwoofer.
So far so good. The AS-EQ1 is working nicely and noticeably better than the Onkyo over the range of the LFE channel even though it’s not being utilized to it’s full potential yet. Probably the next set of test will but one and two rows of seats using optimal measurements for the AS-EQ1. Then the part I can’t wait for, calibrating two similar and also two dissimilar subwoofers.
