Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Should I have a professional calibrate my system?

I wanted Bayne to come to this conclusion himself .

Bayne, do you see the link on their site that says "PRODUCT LINES"?

After you finish tweaking, I'd certainly be glad to come over and give you my opinion if you want.

Mojo, what about expanding this offer to include me? I'm only one country away.

You and your A1400 are welcome up here anytime .

Hey, you turned it around on me!

Well I'm glad I asked for some advice. Based on the negative responses so far, I'd have to say that I'm not going to bother with 'professional' help calibrating the receiver. In fact, if the amazing quote I got over the phone from General Audio here in Calgary was correct, then I'll be buying the receiver from them instead. I'm starting to get quite excited. In 3 days I can order my M2's, a short time later I'll pick up the receiver and an HD-DVD player. Then around Christmas it's time for real home theatre style seating for 4 and a 1080p projector. Unfortunately once I'm done spending, my wife gets to spend the same amount of money on stuff she wants.

Bayne,

Calibrating the speakers is so very easy with an SPL meter that its not even funny. I borrowed one from my church as I don't own one and radio shack is not is business anymore.

YOu can order the Avia disc and a radio shack SPL meter from sonicboomaudio.com for $100 I think. If you have neither, it would be well worth it to spend your money there and learn how to do it yourself. Every time you change something in your room you will need to re-calibrate.

I am thinking about getting that set from sonicboom...I really wish Axiom would sell those radioshack SPL meters, I think they would sell alot of them to their canadian customers!

Some thoughts on calibration….

For audio, unless you want to spring for Audysey Pro calibration, I see no value in paying for this service. Audysey Pro is quite complex and the calibrator must be certified to do this. You’ll end up with a notebook full of graphs that will baffle even the most geeky of the audio geeks. But, the calibrator will be able to identify areas of your room where room treatments / base traps will help. It’s a total package and quite intensive. If the “calibrator” shows up with a Radio Shack meter and an Avia or DVE disk, you know you just got BS’ed.

To set up these new AVR’s, especially when they come with Audysey EQ, anyone with a 3rd grade reading level and basic HT system working knowledge can do it easily. You will want to run Audysey and then simply verify the settings. Audysey is not completely fool proof, so be prepared to make some changes to the settings when it is done. For instance, it will most likely set your center to large and you’ll want to change that to small. Your X-overs may also be a little weird. Just play with these some to your liking. You should be able to save the Audysey settings and then copy them to a manual user profile, then make changes as needed to that profile. You can then (should be able to) toggle back and forth between the Audysey settings and your manual settings to see what you prefer.

One area of professional calibration I do recommend (if you can afford it), is video calibration. A certified IFS video calibrator can do absolute wonders for your display. Unfortunately, the going price for this service is around $500. The calibrator will come with a laptop, meters and spend a day setting color, gamma, blacks and contrast. It’s amazing what a properly calibrated display can look like. Not very many come out of the box properly calibrated and without the proper testing equipment; you just don’t know if your display is accurately displaying the popper RGB spectrum.

That's why Alaskans should get LCD TVs, which aren't affected by magnetic fields.