"Official" Yamaha RX-A1000/RX-A2000/RX-A3000 thread - Page 212

No real surprises there

Isn't the A3000 only rated at about 66wpc with 5 channels driven?

and yes I own one and like it...but I have( or have had) several AVr's that seem a lot more dynamic and powerful..including an Onkyo 875 and a few other notables


Warren

I've also used one that was more powerful and dynamic. The only problem with it was the minor bugs it had. It was the H/K 7550HD. After using the Onkyo875, then the H/K, and now the A3000. I would have to say it is the weakest power wise than the other two. The H/K was easily more powerful than the 876 also. Now as for as sound and of course I feel it has to do with the different EQ programs, the H/K was also to me the best sounding of the three. The 876 was a distant third. I'm now using the A3000 along with my Parasound 2205 and it sounds very good. Does it sound as good as the H/K, not IMO. Close but there was a difference. Harman needs to get their act together on building these things to operate as they should and would sell as many as the others. It was still my favorite to use to date. It may be time for me to try separates and get away from using AVR's pre-pros. Something is missing to me at this time with current offerings. Too much added to them and too many problems. They are getting far too complicated and QC on these things are really beginning to suck. Time to try another way to do things for me. I'm getting to hard to satisfy in my old age.

Yamaha a2000

When using the 12v trigger to trigger my xpa5 amp to turn off and on with my yamaha what settings do i put it on. The manual confuses me on this subject..?

I would say the A3000 sounded better than my 875..musically speaking

However...its in a bedroom where I am running bookshelves

Had I been running some inefficient towers with the 875 vs A3000 I would have quite a different preference..based on my situation

If you are using AVR's as pre/pros then the benefit of a beefy amp section doesn't do any good for you

I agree with you on the buggy thing....I had two repair issues with that Onkyo concerning HDMI and DSP boards

In 7 months of ownership the A3000 has been problem free...time will tell I guess


Warren

hook up the wire to trigger 1 out on the yamaha and then to the xpa-5. someone said a few days ago the avr's are trigger ready out of the box. if you need to change it, press the onscreen button and go to setup or settings (can't remember exactly which) it will be the first on the top.

Hi,

I want all my speakers to be small but YPAO amakes them large. Can I disable speaker size choice in YPAO? If so where is this done?

Thanks

Hi,

I've just finished YPAO in my R2000 and it all came out A-OK except it reported that the sub-woofer is "out of phase". So I switched the leads on the output of the sub amp and it still reported "out of phase". The sub is an NHT driven by an amp, all of which is probably 15 years old. Does anybody know what I should or can do now to correct this? Thanks!

press the "onscreen" button on the remote. go to setup and then speakers. you can change the size and other stuff there.

You can change them to small easy enough. Press on screen on the remote,scroll to setup :enter,scroll to speaker: enter, choose manual setup:enter,scroll down to configuration:enter, then go through each speaker and change to small. You will also have the option to change the crossover for the front L/R, center, and your surrounds. Try 80Hz for a starting point. After they are all changed to your liking just press on screen again and you are good to go. Good luck and enjoy.

Do you have more than cable connected to your sub? Don't have an idea about that sub but most just need the one cable connected to usually the left input(LFE). See if yours is marked as such and try that.

Thanks Phantom, the preamp output of the R2000 is connected via single channel RCA into the input of the Sub Amp. The Sub amp is then connected by heavy speaker cabling across the room with the sub itself. I only switched the leads on the amp output that go directly to the sub input. Can there by phasing switches on the amp or on the sub I'm wondering? It's really incovenient in my setup but I'll have to check on this. I know there are crossover controls on both sub and amp but I've forgotten anything else that may be there. I can't find my old manual.

There is also the ability to change the phase in the speaker setup for the sub in the Yammie. Did you try changing it in there and then re-running YPAO? It may work for you in that way. Hopefully that may fix it for you. Good luck and hope that does it for you.

If you are trying from Favorites your 2000 IP address might of changed.
since you added it to your Favorites
It has happen to me.
Just open Windows Explorer go to Networks you
should see your RX-A2000s icon and right click it and go to Properties.
You will see the IP address


JohnnyJT
South Philly

Probably a crazy question, but do you need to run YPAO after making changes to the speaker size?

Is YPOA smart enough to know that it's been manually changed and therefore recalibrate using the new settings?

OR...

Is there nothing calibrated based on the speaker size except for the crossover?

For some reason,YPAO sets my fronts to small even though they're really big speakers (B&W CM9's). It then sets my Bose 301 bookshelf surrounds to large. It correctly sets my CMC2 to large, but I switched it to small to route LFE to the sub to improve dialog clarity.

I've asked this question here before but I didn't see any responses so I thought I would try again.

For those of you who manually calibrate your system, what SPL do you use? Also, what's a good calibration DVD? I've never calibrated a system before and I'm not even sure if I'd be able to.

I might be able to figure out the levels correctly, but I'd have no idea where to even start for EQ'ing the speakers. Those graphs don't mean anything to me because I don't know what they SHOULD look like when perfectly EQ'd, or how to make proper adjustments.

How did you learn how to fully calibrate a system? Book? Trial and error? If it's by trial and error, I think I'll just have to hire someone because I don't want to waste the rest of my life trying to figure it out. :-))

After running YPAO change all speakers to small and leave it there. Do not re-run YPAO, it will just undo what you changed again. Also the crossover is not calibrated. That is also something you can change. Try the 80 Hz setting for all of them to begin with. With this setting you have better bass response with the subwoofer.

75 db on the meter is the level. However when you use this type of setup you are not actually doing any Eq'ing. What you are actually doing is setting the speaker levels and nothing else. Use this type of setup if you do not want use YPAO, it's the EQ program that also sets levels, delays, and distances. As for a calibration disk I've used AVIA before and it is a good one for me. Have not used one though for a while. Good luck and have fun setting this thing up, the more you fool with it the more you will learn about it and how these things actually work. Hey if you really mess it up you can always bring it back to factory settings with a few simple moves. Don't over analyze these things, just have some fun working to get the sound you want. You are the only one that has to be satisfied. Good luck and enjoy.

How much of an upgrade is the RX-A1000 over the 800?

I bought the 800 about 4 or 5 months ago thru an EBay auction (new). Got it landed to me in Canada, after all duties, etc., for a good $300 - $400 less than what I could have gotten it new here. (even now I would still pay at least $200 more for a new one here)

Right now, NewEgg Canada is listing "recertified" RX-A1000 for about 1/2 the price of what a new one would have been back when I was looking at them 4 - 6 months ago.

At the time of my decision, I had rationalized that I didn't need the networking capabilities of the 1000, which seemed (to me) to be the big "step up" between the two - and then I stumbled on the EBay auction, and the rest is history.

I am liking the 800, but I've read many things suggesting that the 1000 is a different beast (and that the 2000 is the way to go, or the 3000 if you can swing the price).

I am going to be needing a second AVR in the near future to setup a secondary system - I have/had been planning to just get a reasonable 5.1 model on a closeout around Boxing Day. But, now I'm wondering if I shouldn't just pony up and grab one of these 1000's to use in my main system and relegate the 800 to secondary duty.

Other than networking capability, what am I missing with the 800????

The AVR is not checking for electrical phasing, this is acoustic phasing. You can switch the phase of the sub in the AVR setup, but only do it if you like the sound of it better. You probably should also consider adjusting placement of the sub. Do the sub crawl. There's no right or wrong with sub phasing, it's whatever sounds best to you.

Thanks.

I'm assuming that if I changed the crossover setting on my center channel to something even higher than 80 (say 90 or 100) that the dialog might be a tad better?

Also, after YPAO runs and the level for all speakers are set to 0, I'm assuming that I could change all of them to a 10 to increase their volume level. Is there any negative impact of doing this? Does the sound quality get worse solely by increasing the level? If I increase the level, does the EQ also need to be adjusted to be "correct", or are they completely independent of each other?

Increasing the levels increased the loudness significantly, which was my goal.

Thanks in advance.

Mainly a fair number of inputs, 2 more HDMI, 2 more optical, 1 more coaxial, 5 more analogue audio, 2 more component, S-Video, Phono, and USB. There's also a optical output. The RX-A1000 has a bit more powerful amps and you can assign the analogue video outputs to zone 2.

Note that the networking capability gives you a fair amount of stuff on its own. Internet radio, DLNA, and the ability to control the receiver through a browser running on your PC, or special apps available for the iPhone and Andriod devices.

One thing though, a Canadian version of the RX-A1000 will be missing things that the American version of the RX-A1000 (and your RX-A800) have. No HD Radio, no Sirius satellite port, and no support for Internet music services like Pandora (which will probably block your Canadian IP address anyways.)

It's a pretty big jump in features from the RX-A800 and RX-A1000, but for most people not a lot of those features are going to be useful. I think network control would be the most popular. You might also want to check out the RX-V867 or its successor the RX-V871. The RX-V867 fit in between the two receivers feature-wise and was usually cheaper than the RX-A800.

I wouldn't hold out on great Boxing Day sales on these Yamaha receivers or comparable models by other manufactures. The best prices you see on receivers come after their replacements ship, and Christmas falls right in the middle of most manufactures release cycles. (Also watch out Future Shop and/or Best Buy introducing exclusive high-end receiver models a few weeks before Christmas at insanely high prices, and then "massively" discounting them on Boxing Day to something that's merely overpriced.)

The purpose of speaker level is to get the same dB in the sweetspot of your room from all speakers. Zero x 7.1 would be ideal in a perfect world, but few of us have perfect rooms nor perfectly identical speakers. It's not unusual to have +2/+1/0/0/-1/-3 etc. as you adjust each speaker via the test tones. Distance, placement, efficiency, room acoustics all have a bearing on the level needed to balance the room. This is what the SPL meter is used for.

You do not want to try to get all speakers maxed out (+10) in the setup menu. Volume is determined at the receiver when you are finished calibrating.

Level and eq are independent of each other. Db level is pretty much 'how loud' the speakers play. A person normally uses eq to level the frequency response on a speaker or in a room. Simply put eq is normally used to have the high, medium, and low notes have matching db's (volume).

Raising the level on all the speakers 5 db's is no different than turning your master volume up 5 db's. Raising one speaker 5 dbs will result in that speaker being 5 db's louder. In my experience YPAO does a good job level matching speakers assuming your running speakers from the same manufacturer and speaker series. Subwoofers, not so much.

You might benefit from raising your center channel's crossover, but normally it is best to leave it at 80 Hz. Normally the center channel's goal in a home theater is to handle dialogue (some settings will share dialogue with the l/r channel however) and raising the crossover higher will share the lower dialogue frequency range with the subwoofer, which is often not desirable.

Wow, all of this stuff is starting to make a lot more sense now. I had no idea what EQ'ing was really doing.

So it sounds like increasing the level for all speakers within setup is perfectly acceptable. I had one speaker with a level of +2.5 and I wanted all speakers to be set as a +10. I increased that speaker to a +10 and then increased the level for all others by 7.5.

I would have thought that YPAO should have done what I did manually. Now I don't need to turn up the volume to such a low number to get to the loudness that I want, and I have more power left to increase it even more than I had before.

You don't have any more headroom to play louder just because you adjusted the levels (you'll run out of power before you reach maximum value on the dial anyway). But now you have no adjustment room left if you want, for example, to bump up the center channel a bit because dialog is too low on a certain movie (it happens some times). You'd have to reduce all the others instead, which is more effort.

Ok, so I think you're saying that the volume will not increase past a certain point and by increasing the level I've just reduced that "point" by the amount of the level increase. In addition, soundtracks need headroom to provide additional effect and increasing the level decreases the headroom available for those effects. Is that correct?

If all of that is correct, what would be the best speaker amp configuration to use for maximum power to just 5 speakers without biamping? Front, center and surrounds.

If I bought an external amp rated at 140 watts/channel and used that to power the fronts and center, would the A3000 power only the rears at the same wattage?

Could I use an external amp with the A3000 for 5 channels, or is there a limitation?

*Agrees with kriksemaj99*

It's ok if you turn the main volume up higher. Even with your +7.5/10 (like kriktsemaj99 mentions) your amp power/headroom is the same. raising all the speakers individually like that is not normally done. If it was me i'd put it back and just listen at main volume -10 instead of -17.5 with the channels at +7.5/+10. Also keep in mind that the main volume on the RX-A3000 goes up to +16, so you can go past 0. The real goal of of adjusting the db's on individual speakers is so they all have the same db's when they arrive at the primary listening position, even if the speakers aren't equidistant from the primary listening position. That's why a speaker was set to +2.5... it was either farther from the primary listening position or some room configuration issue which reduces the sound.

None of this is what we normally consider EQ'ing by the way. Here's an article on EQ'ing a subwoofer. It doesn't explain why you'd eq a subwoofer (for equal frequency response, or for some a house curve so you can feel substantial bass) but it might help give you a basic idea. With all the money you've been investing in your Home Theater as of late (I saw you picked up a SVS sub), it might be worth reading then picking up a SPL meter at Radio Shack.

Most of this is wrong. Why should he move his sub to deal with an "Out-Of-Phase" error? It may be out of phase, but there's no reason it couldn't be put "in-phase" in it's current location.

I use a 5 channel amp with my a3000. Another 2 channel amp just arrived to add to the a3000. I think 9 channels is the max you can run with external amps. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

What an awesome article! I'm happy to see that the sub he EQ'd is the same as the one I just bought so I'll be able to do some direct comparisons.

Do know of another article on EQ'ing CM9's?!!!

I saw a $50 SPL at radio shack last weekend but wasn't sure if it'd be sufficient.

I read in the article to use software for calibrating the sub, so is there similar software to use for calibrating the other speakers? I had a guy come to my house a while back to calibrate my old system, but he used DVD's and a SPL.