Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater MCACC from Pioneer.

I put mine in the center of the room because there are many seating positions within the room. This seems to work for me.

It never hurts to experiment but I do agree that the primary listening position should at least be your starting point.

I used the primary position for my calibrations but then used the advanced MCACC to compensate for standing waves at 3 points across my main couch. Note that you can only do the 3 point standing wave measurement if you go into the advanced MCACC and perform that specific calibration individually. Full auto mode will only use the one position.

Main thing is to experiment and do what sounds best to you. Have fun!

Sort of a mixed bag between MCACC and Audyssey. One tried to make a single, primary position as great as possible, but potentially at the expense of other listening positions in the room, the other tried to make all listening locations good, but at a compromise of making a single spot great.

That is my understanding, and I could be way off on the Audyssey.

Of course if you have decent room treatments, I would think that the Audyssey could be VERY successful for multiple listening locations sounding great.

I am doing a number of sound treatments in my current theater build, and while I've been a die hard Pioneer user since v1.0 of my theater back 10 years ago (building v4.0 now), I am going to be looking hard at other brands mainly to try out Audyssey's multi-location tuning. With the treatments, I am hoping for several great listening locations with only minimal compromises vs. one finite sweet spot that I've had in the past.

The GUI does not offer the possiblity to set each speaker individualy. I only have 50hz-80-hz-100hz, etc to all my speakers.

Yup, that's a limitation of the Pioneer processing/design - only one global X over setting is allowed. I personally don't find it a limitation for my setup, BUT if I had M80's or something bigger that might bug me enough to change receiver brands.

I still say that you are either making it great for 1 or pretty darn good for many. Just a different way to do it. Both do well in helping to fix frequency issues...

I did come across the following comment by Alan Lofft in his article on choosing a receiver:

How to buy a receiver
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Auto-Setup and Calibration

Even inexpensive AV receivers now have some type of auto-setup mode, with many including a supplied microphone and auto-calibration/equalization circuit (Audyssey is very common) that claims to adjust the frequency response of the system’s speakers to match the room’s characteristics.

While the auto-setup modes are initially useful for first-timers, they are still prone to error, sometimes setting speakers that are small to “Large” and making errors in speaker level settings of 4 dB or more. You should still do a manual check using a sound-level meter and a pink-noise signal.

Unless you have really poor speakers, I recommend you turn off the auto-EQ circuits. They may help smooth out the non-linear spikey frequency response of poorly designed speakers, but with really smooth linear speakers like Axioms, they often degrade sound quality.
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And when Alan has wrote this ?

Hello Philippe. I also have an SC27, M80's and a VP150.

The M80's, I would say you can run either as large or small depending on which sounds better to you. I have tried both and this week I prefer setting them to large.

The VP150 I would always set to small because it's bass extension (85 hz at the 3db down point) is not as good as the M80's. MCACC always sets my VP150 to large, so I change it back to small after running MCACC.

MCACC also tries to correct pretty hard at 250 hz in my room with the M80's. I guess you know that you can tweak the MCACC settings. I normally copy the MCACC results I use to another memory slot and adjust to taste.

There is no right and wrong really. What sounds best to you? MCACC on or off, Phase control on or off and S-Wave on or off? Try them all and pick what sounds best. FWIW, I like the M80's large, the V150 and QS8's small, EQ on, Fullband Phase on and the EQ tweaked by ear but I've tried all the combinations.

Nick, I don't have MCACC and wasn't following this closely. As you commented, you might be "way off" in how Audyssey works. What it doesn't do is to simply average different results from around the room at the expense of getting the best result in the central listening area. I requested and received references to technical papers from Dr. Kyriakakis which go into detail on the complex process involved, which was helpful in my decision to use Audyssey. The multiple measurement points(the more the better)aren't scattered about the room at various locations, but are tightly clustered about the central listening positions(suggested to be within about 2')to give as many samples as possible for the mathematical algorithm to work with. For example, see this illustration showing that even with 12 measurement points being used, they're all at the main listening location, not at widely separate alternate locations. Also, some of the FAQs here relate to the multiple measurement point question in a somewhat simplified way and are worth reading.

Although I use Audyssey, certainly MCACC when applied correctly has benefits and should be used to improve the overall listening results.