Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Why go Anthem receiver?

I am again sitting at a cross roads. I currently have a 2011 model year Pioneer VSX-1126k. It is a great home theater unit and even comes THX certified. Yet I think this unit has some sound limitations that I don't know if they are holding me back.

One thing that I have not seen in the settings menu is any area to control how the unit interacts with a sub woofer. You can tell it yes that you have a sub, but there is no settings for the cross over points. Likewise, you don't have any control over the crossover points for the speakers either. You can say they are large or small. What that means for the processing inside the unit is rather vague in they define large full range.

In my case, I have the top end LFR1100 speakers, so they definitely are not small. I am quite happy to run them full range, but as I have a pair of EP500s as well, I'd like the sub to supplement the sound that the fronts produce. I don't know and dont think this receiver is capable of doing this.

I know from my stint with a Marantz AV7005 pre that you could through its setup define a crossover for both the front channels to drive below a certain point (ie 45hz falloff) to go to the SUB, plus run the sub in parallel with a higher crossover point (ie 80hz falloff). So where the speakers are capable of producing sound but do so at a -db of SPL you can get the sub to fill in.

I don't know if this is something that is important as I don't know if I have ever gotten the unit setup correctly with the speakers right and sound treatment correct. I know that sound I remember with the speakers upstairs in my front room that was larger sounded better to me I think, but it's not a side by side A/B test.

I currently don't have the speakers for ATMOS and don't know if I will want speakers in the ceiling. I don't know if I really need anything beyond 5.1 right now, but would consider going to 7.1 (well effectively it's .2 as i currently own two sub woofers).

Why go with one receiver over any other. Does the MRX1120 have something far more over the MRX720? Am I just lost?