Onkyo PR-SC885 surround processor - part 1

It's been a long month waiting for the arrival of my Onkyo PR-SC885 surround processor . But alas...

" The beast had arrived and I wasted no time dragging the box inside like a lion after it’s kill."

:-)

I read this from an AVS forum member who just received his Onkyo 885 and I thought it was so funny because that is exactly how I was as soon as I saw it on my door step!

My very first impression was "Wow, this unit is huge" It measures about 16.5 inches deep vs my Sunfire amp which measures about 15.5 inches deep. The 885 is touted as a "professional" model and comes with rack mounts but I was glad the rackmounts came in a separate box and not pre-installed The overall build quality is excellent although maybe not as rock solid to the likes of other pre/pros in it's price range ie Outlaw and Emotiva. I prefer my HT gear to be as minimalist / spartan looking as possible. With that said, one of the draws for me to the 885 over the Integra DTC-9.8 (clone of 885) was the clean front panel and the metal hinged door hiding the infrequently used buttons.

I spent the first few days just doing basic set up and making sure all the connections were working. Given the history of HDMI handshake issues, lip sync issues, etc I was a bit worried about running into these kinds of problems but luckily I have been able to switch between HDMI 1.3 based sources like my Toshiba XA2 and Playstation 3 on the fly without a hitch.

Over the weekend I spent most of the time doing speaker set up and calibration. I tried two iterations of the Audyssey MultEQ XT speaker setup program measuring 6 seating locations on a tripod and using the suggestions from this thread. The end results were mixed.

First the good news. The detected speaker distances were not too far off which was good. It did report my sub as 30 ft away though which I thought was odd but according to the thread, this is not unheard of. OK, fine. My front Def Tech towers are bi-wired and Audyssey was also able to detect that my left front speaker was not properly connected even though sound was coming out. At first I thought the Audyssey program was in error but when I looked at the speaker connection, sure enough it was loose. Pretty impressive.

Now the not-so-good news. Audyssey set my front speakers as full range and my surround cross over frequency to 100Hz . With the fronts set as full range, this meant that LFE (bass response) frequencies were sent to my mid-drivers instead of my subs which I did not want. Speaker levels (dB) for the fronts vs the center channel vs the surrounds vs the LFE differed by as much as 9db! The LFE was utterly neutered using the Audyssey EQ settings. What is also frustrating is that you can't view what the actual Audyssey EQ settings are. So with the Audyssey settings, the sound levels were terribly uneven, soundtracks were colored, and lacked any OOMPH from the LFE. I'm not trying to poo poo the Audyssey program here. Many folks have reported excellent results but I just could not get it to work.