I apologize for the noobish-ness of the post, as I can imagine you've all had to see things like this a million times over. I searched the forum a bit, googled "reference level setup," and didn't seem to find any truly helpful links.

The setup that I have is an Onkyo 505 receiver, Polk RM6800 speakers, and I use an optical 5.1 cable for my TV viewing, and I have the receiver hooked in through multi-analog to my HTPC.

I've been reading recently about this "reference level" setup for your receiver/speakers to obtain optimal sound. How do you go about setting this up? Is there any web page, or anything out there which will give me a proper guide as to how you go about getting this taken care of? I'd like to do it, but it seems like you need to do your homework before you get all the speakers set up.

Thank you very much to anyone who can guide me in the right direction on this, I would really appreciate it.

If you do a proper calibration technique as described here 20 billion times or in any receiver or calibration DVD manual, you will end up with both your system calibrated and the volume setting for "reference" playback. However, there are other variables such as dialog normalization and DTS-playback levels that alter the so called "reference" setting.

My advice: just calibrate the speakers to each other and don't worry about a "reference" volume.

So using an SPL meter is sufficient?

So using an SPL meter is sufficient?

Yessum...

My advice: just calibrate the speakers to each other and don't worry about a "reference" volume.

+1