grunt,
Your explanation is excellent. I wish I had written it myself. I am not sure I would want to boost my surround channels by 3 dB but it is a great example of using the manual calibration settings to customize things to your liking and your room. I am a big fan of living with your various experiments for a while to experience different content being played before landing a final decision. Adjusting channel volumes and x-over points is not affecting the tonal balance and therefore not causing the sort of potential damage that things like Auto Room EQ can cause, certainly above 300 Hz. One of these days we will take some actual measurements of what Auto EQ devices are doing to the amplitude response. It would be interesting to see the effects, measured in the anechoic chamber, after the correction had been applied in a room.
The above said I do think JohnK brought up a valid point though. If you don’t have, at a minimum, a decent SPL meter to play around with the manual calibration settings, the auto calibration may be the safest bet.
