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.

I don't know if I should laugh or cry..... I'm always getting picked on.. It's just not fare!!!

It's not fair either.

Bayne, you made a good decision.

The 3808CI does a great job calibrating the speakers - I found no need for my meter. The included mic and audyssey (sp?) works fine (you don't need to use the audyssey eq settings which I didn't like, just the speaker distance and level settings). There is a bug with the sub calibration - it set mine to -12db which was way too quiet.

>>By calibrating your home theatre system to produce the proper sound for the placement of your speakers, whether they are in cabinets, in walls or on stands, properly adjusting the levels of these speakers can produce a much more enjoyable experience. Without calibrating your system there can be peaks and valleys in your sound waves producing dead and live areas in the room. The dead areas will cause the person in that area to be removed from the movie and the person in the peak areas to develop listening fatigue.

I call BS on whoever wrote the ad. The guy doing the calibrating may be competent, but the ad copy is bogus.

Calibrating the system is not going to do much for "live and dead areas" -- only speaker placement and room treatments can do that -- but it will make sure the sound from each speaker is "balanced" so you get as close to the effect that the audio engineers intended.

If you didn't have good internet resources (like us, he says with a big smile) then it would probably be worth bringing someone competent in to help you calibrate the first time. If you're not interested in learning about calibration then by all means bring in someone, but if you are at all interested then here's another vote for doing it yourself.

IMO the big benefit is not "doing it better", but (a) being able to experiment to make the sound "perfect for you" rather than "reference perfect", and (b) being able to calibrate the system *again* after you screw up the settings

Way ahead of you. I've printed of several articles with step-bystep guides to using the Avia disk and Radio Shack SPL meter. I'll let the Audyssey do it's thing, tweak it, and then go to town with the SPL meter. Then, in a few weeks when the new HT seating arrives, do it all over again. I imagine I'll be seeking more advice when everything arrives from you friendly know-it-alls.

Following the Avia or Sound and Vision type setup discs are great, very easy.
Stick to that and most of your home calibration for audio and video should be taken care of, short of having a pro do your projection unit as mdrew mentioned.
THAT may be worth having a pro do the work.
I've delved into the service menu with our now 5 year old Toshiba CRTV and it is not that touchy, but finding the proper info is tough.