Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater AVR or pre amp recommendations? Going 4K

That will only happen over some zombies dead bodies ... oh ... wait a second ...

Hmmm...yeah...numbers.

For S/N, you have to know two things: ambient noise of your space and the level where your ears compress. Ears compress at 120dB. Ambient noise is probably no better than 30dB. This means a S/N greater than 90dB is practically of no importance.

For THD+N, it's generally accepted that anything less than 1% over the entire audible band and volume levels is inaudible.

The figures above are for the entire *system* and not individual components.

ear compression ... interesting way to come up with a number ...

1% THD was the number I was using back in the day (because that, as you point out, was considered inaudible). I*d like to see something below 0.5 for my set up just because. Any thing below 0.1 I would call just a number. Using the same 10x cushion for your S/N number puts Noise at 100dB down ... I would not pick one system over another to do better.

BTW I doubt distortion is a real concern in any reasonable pre amp stage today.

I think I'm going to swap out my Denon for a used Anthem MRX 720. From what I've read, it'd be worth it just for the improvement that ARC brings over Audyssey.

Be careful used. We've heard one horror story already. I'm waiting for Axiom's pre/pro.

Horror story? The 1120 that had issues after a firmware update?

Is Axiom actually working on a pre/pro?? Would be awesome, although I know Ian despises room correction.

I’m sure if they came out with a preprocessor it would be done well ... that said

It is also a lot of work if you are going beyond the standard surround decoding chips. Just look at all these companies sliding their dates (or worse coming out with half working products) trying to produce 16 channel surround. Not sure how Axiom would differentiate them selves otherwise. I think it would be high risk tech wise, resources draining and a hard sell to anyone who was not familiar with Axiom. It would have to have some sort of auto room correction for it to be a marketable product.

BTW I use room correction for my everyday room setups but will probably use REW to hand tune (treatment and parameters) for the theater once it’s finished.

Ian doesn't like the existing room correction because it's primitive. Imagine however an array of microphones that sense how The Family of Curves is affected by the room and compensated for in the DSP.

Would be awesome to see Axiom build their own room correction software, although I'd imagine that'd be quite an undertaking. Could license it to others if it turned out well though.

I'm very impressed with ARC over my last two Denon's with Audyssey. And I have not taken the time to really dig into the program and make room tweaks. I just ran it the one time with five locations and called it good.