I move into my house being built in about 2 months. I am slowly piecing together a new home theater/pseudo-audiophile system in anticipation of the move. I got the amp last week as it was an incredible deal. It is rated 9.2 for 4ohm at 210W. Is this going to drive the M80 adequately (and the 180 center channel)?

If any of you have that exact setup, please let me know your experiences.

Thanks
McDave

Mac, welcome. The basic 8 ohm rating of the 1522 is 130 watts. As always, the amount of power needed by a speaker depends on how loudly you play it. The M80 and VP180 are slightly above average in sensitivity and require a bit less power for a given volume level than many smaller speakers. The 1522(and any other similar unit)has sufficient maximum output capability to drive them to beyond safe(to your hearing)listening levels.

I do have that exact setup, and I think it works great. I can only offer a subjective comparison to my previous Onkyo 9.2 receiver used with the same speakers, and I think the Pioneer sounds much better. My current favorite mode for the 1522-K is "optimum surround" (auto/direct) with "wide surround movie" (standard), which exercises the front wide speakers -- those being M22s in my system.

To clarify, you use the 1522-k as the amp and pre-amp, right? I want to make sure it can drive the M80s and 180 without external amplification. Also, seems like there is no worry mixing 8ohm and 4ohm speakers in the setup (and 6ohm, I suppose)?

Thanks!
Mac

Mac, Greg is offline at this time, but yes, he uses the internal amplifier in his 1522-K. As I pointed out above, that or other similar receivers can drive The M80s and VP180 to beyond safe listening levels.

That's right, using speakers with different impedance ratings doesn't create a problem.

Yes, I use only the 1522, with no separate preamp or amp., and further with no biamping. My 1522 drives its maximum 9 speakers. However, I cannot tell you for sure whether the 1522 has sufficient power, for this, since I haven't done tests that would show distortions, if there are any. I don't hear distortions. And the 1522 sounds better to me, just judging it subjectively, than the Onkyo I had previously driving the same speakers. One thing it sounds better at is playing very soft background music accompanying dialog. I believe, before I got the 1522, I just was not noticing the presence of this soft music at all.

I don't at all agree with what JohnK says in the above posting. When an amplifier has insufficient power, the distorted sound can be very loud and painful to listen to. So, the fact that an amplifier can produce sounds that are painfully loud does not at all show that it is powerful enough to do its job of producing sweet melodious music. In any event, I don't play my AVR at high volumes. I just have no interest in doing that.

Said nothing of the sort, Greg.

It only takes 1 watt to reach roughly 95db according to the m80 specs. That's at 1 metre away from the speakers. doubling the distance, drops that another 6 db or so(someone correct me if I'm wrong)

Anything beyond 85db is considered unsafe to your hearing.

Though the validity in this is questionable to me. I've been playing in front of extremely loud guitar amplifiers and home stereo for many years, well beyond 110 db at times, and for work my hearing is regularly tested. And I'm still good to go, so who knows.

John's basically saying it doesn't matter how much power you have on hand, the speakers will only ask for a certain amount according to their "need" for it at the time. So unless you plan to listen to music at 120db or something, he's saying that the power on hand in the Pioneer will more then be good up to safe hearing levels

That may very well be so for this particular receiver, and I suppose it depends on what you mean by "good". But in general the fact that an amplifier-speaker combination is sufficient to damage your hearing is not a guarantee that the amp can produce high fidelity sound with the speaker. This stuff about "safe hearing levels" seems irrelevant, to me.

It does if the receiver can reach those levels within its rated specs. All the good receivers are below 1% thd when kept within their rated power. You get clean power to 'beyond safe hearing levels'.

Yes, as Nick and Fred point out, any reference to sufficient amplifier output levels has to logically mean clean and transparent, certainly not accompanied by "painful distortion".

Nick, one point to note is that the 6dB per doubling of distance factor only applies under anechoic conditions. In home listening rooms reinforcement from room surfaces is such that a typical result(as reported in research by Dr. Toole and others)is a 3dB loss per doubling. This is the factor which I apply in calculations relating to the sufficiency of amplification at safe listening levels. The typical result with receivers having ratings anywhere in the 100-150 watt area is sufficient output(clean!!!)with speakers of average sensitivity, such as Axioms, for those levels at typical home listening distances.

I used to play electric guitar at extremely loud levels and listen to loud music as a teen. Had excellent hearing most of my life, then in my 50's, I got a constant ringing in my ears from all the previous damage. It won't show up right away, but eventually it'll catch up with you.

I know the feeling, even without yours and my musical histories, scientifically it has been proven that as we get older, men just naturally, more than women tend to lose the ability to hear high frequencies so when someone touts a 96 or 192KHZ capabilities of a recording I am not impressed. I recently put on a frequency sweep audio test disc and I can barely hear beyond 15KHZ!

Casey, you're mixing apples and oranges.

When you see that a recording was made at 192KHz, that doesn't mean that it was made to enable you to hear frequencies that high. The 192KHz refers to the sampling frequency. The upper-end of the treble is likely 20KHz.

casey:

If you can hear out to 15Khz then you are doing really well.

My listening today is limited to peaks of 85 to 90 Db. I find that over that is just too loud. In my 2 X M2s / 2 X EP400s audio only system, my 35W/CH Tube Amp easily pushes out these levels in a fairly large room.

I took one of those online 'hearing tests' & at 65 years old, I peak out at 12-13 Khz, that I understand is still good for my age.

If you take one of these tests, be sure to use speakers or head phones that are capable of reproducing the higher frequencies or you might be disappointed, ha! Initially I used an el-cheapo Sony portable mini-radio headset & couldn't hear anything over about 8-9 Khz. My big, high end Sony headphones enabled me to easily hear 12 Khz...

TAM

Remember too that the difference between hearing up to 15K and hearing up to 19K isn't really that big of a difference...less than half an octave. In addition, there's not much up there except the uppermost sizzle of some cymbals.

I'm not trivializing hearing loss.

My dad never wanted to invest in a good system because he had his hearing tested and found he couldn't hear much above 15K. In his mind, he felt like he had such serious hearing loss that he couldn't appreciate a good audio system. So he went decades without a good playback system, despite having enjoyed nice systems up until his 40s.

Here is an excellent, interactive chart on instrument frequency responses. Hover over each instrument graph bar & it will give additional specific info in small windows to the right:

http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm

It seems that the higher end 'Yellow Bars' are all harmonics & according to this site, nothing in the musical instruments listed here exceed 16Khz. Synthesizers probably can go higher, but most of us on this planet couldn't hear it.

So at 12-13 Khz, I don't think that I'm missing a lot.

Having said all that, woe be to any speaker or amp designer that willfully cuts off their high end at around 16Khz even though above it, that capability is largely wasted...

TAM