Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners AVR Audio Format and Input Settings Questions

Pure audio does the same thing as direct plus it turns off the video circuits on the AVR.

THere is an Onkyo TX-SR706 thread at AVS, I;m just going to go ask! THere has to be someone in there named Mr Onkyo

Yeah, on the Denon there is also a Pure Direct mode which turns off the video source going to the TV, the On screen GUI, the receiver panel, ect.

Direct should directly send each channel's audio to that channel. So for CDs there'll be no sub-woofer activity. But for formats which have a .1 channel, the sub will get some information, but only that which is encoded as LFE. So that means all your other speakers will be forced to play full range for any content which is on their specific channels.

Personally, even with music, I want my receiver crossing over the low bass from each channel to the sub were it is handled better. So I don't use any "direct" mode.

I give up ... which mode do you use?

Direct mode on my Denon 2807 allowed the option to use a subwoofer with a separate crossover setting from the primary setup for just 2ch digital sources.

My Onkyo 3007 allows the choice to use a subwoofer in “Direct” mode for 2ch analog sources but not digital.

However, on both I believe the default setting is subwoofer “off.”

Well, I have a Pioneer, so everything is named differently. Most of the time I use the full processing mode, which does time alignment for speaker distances, crossover, EQ, standing wave attenuation, and loudness to boost bass as the volume is decreased, along with enabling Prologic IIx to turn everything to 7.1 (switching to Music for music, and Movie for everything else; I don't use Game even when gaming).

But if there's some 2 channel music which doesn't sound right with Prologic, I'll press the Stereo button, which does the time alignment between the sub and the mains, and still applies the EQing, and standing wave stuff.

I do have a profile saved without the EQing, but after listening to both the natural, and the EQed output, I really do prefer the seamless blending between speakers I get from the EQ. Then again, I have a pretty mismatched set of speakers. Though the different it makes is night and day, with it off, when playing some content which is mixing parts into each speaker I can hear each speaker. But with the EQ on, the sound seems as if it is just in the room. The EQing mode I use on my Pioneer, by the way, makes separate adjustments to each speaker, not even taking LR pairs into account, to try to get each one's in-room response to be flat.

Also the standing wave attenuation really does make the bass sound much clearer. It basically finds which frequencies build up in the room, and cause the bass to sound boomy. It cuts (attenuates) those frequency centers, and then adjusts the over-all sub-woofer trim to get the average output to reference level.