Onkyo PR-SC885 surround processor - part 2

The pay off - Spiderman 3: after speaker calibration, the battle scene between Harry (Green Goblin Jr) and Spiderman in uncompressed PCM 5.1 is simply AWESOME. I almost cried.

"Possibly-final-but-good-enough-for-now" post SPL meter settings

Speaker distances that I tweaked just a bit from Audyssey detection results. I may play around with the Subwoofer distance setting but it sounds pretty good so far.

Manually overriding the Audyssey crossover settings to 80Hz settings

Perfoming speaker level calibration using the SPL meter on a tripod. And yes, I made sure it was level ;-)

Radio Shack SPL meter - very handy to have!

So it was time to roll up the sleeves and do the calibration manually. I turned the Audyssey Eq off and made minor adjustments to the speaker distances as determined by Audyssey since they were not too far off the mark. I also set the cross over frequencies for the fronts, center, and surrounds to 80Hz. Next I used a Sound Pressure Level meter from Radio Shack and set the range of sensitivity to 70dB, C - weighting, and "slow" speed setting (averages the changes in pressure). Using test tones from the 885, I adjusted each speaker level up to the point where the SPL meter read 75dB except the LFE which I raised at least 5dB+ higher.

With the EQ set to "off", the highs were extremely harsh - maybe piercing is better adjective - such that I suffered listener's fatigue within 5 minutes. Thankfully, the Onkyo allows you to manually adjust the EQ for the fronts, center, surrounds and LFE individually. I toned down the higher frequencies for the fronts only and the highs were much easier to listen to.

Some initial impressions after the manual calibration -> The sound quality on movies is simply fantastic - finally. For my demo material, I gravitated a lot toward the Spider Man 3 Blu Ray disc which has an unbelievably good uncompressed PCM 5.1 soundtrack. If you want to know how well your sub(s) can handle LFE, I highly recommend the scene where Flint Marko falls into the experimental reactor and transforms into the Sandman. The LFE from this scene even rivals the "Ironhide rocket jump" scene from the Transformers HD DVD. So are the new lossless formats more sizzle than steak? I did subjective A / B comparisons of the lossless tracks vs 448kbps Dolby Digtal. I have to be careful of placebo and probably should note the reference volume levels but so far I find that uncompressed PCM and Dolby True HD tracks sound have greater dynamic range, are more full bodied, less veiled, less harsh, have richer LFE, and surrounds are more aggressively utilized and blend better with L/C/R channels.