Anthem MRX Receivers - 300, 500, 700 Owners Thread & Tweaking Guide - Page 53

Quick update. Anthem support recommended that I take the unit in for replacement. I took it in to the dealer, he hooked it up and verified the problem and replaced the unit. Replacement unit is set-up at home and everything is working great (Oppo BDP-93, DVR, Xbox, Wii, Squeezebox all connected). Zone 2 all set-up, which took awhile since I forgot to tell those channels to be zone 2 in the set-up) and ARC has been performed for movie listening. So far so good.

Heavygen

Call up anthem and find out and tell them what's going on along with the dealer and such. I was at my local dealer today and they told me stock is good and the mrx300 is coming soon. Give anthem a call

I live in US-MN.

That was my next step. Thanks!

Hi, I just purchased the MRX 500 and looking for some guidance. I would like to stream my digital music at the highest quality and am considering the Rega DAC, but I wonder if that would be a mistake as the best reason for having an Anthem is ARC. I assume if I use the Rega DAC then I would want to take the L/R analog out from the DAC and run it into the Anthem, but I have heard that the Anthem will redigitize this input to use ARC on it - does anyone know if this is true? If so, then I would assume buying something like the Rega DAC would be a complete waste?! Does anyone have another recommendation for playing my music library? Other options I've considered are buying a PS3, using a powered external HDD with my content straight into the Anthem or buying an Oppo BDP 93 and using FLAC.

I appreciate any input and guidance!

Your hunch is correct - since Anthem is digitizing stereo analog inputs before further processing, converting your digital signal with an external DAC would be a waste. You already have a digital signal to begin with - pass it to Anthem directly. Anthem will detect sampling rate and word length and your quality will be only limited by the files you are feeding it (up to 192kHz/24bits).

Have you considered a small home theater PC or Mac Mini? You can connect it to Anthem via coaxial or optical SPDIF and send the bits using jukeboxes such as XBMC or Foobar2000. Pretty much all the options you mentioned (PS3, external HDD via USB, Oppo) can stream up to CD quality, but not all of them can handle higher resolutions properly. Personally, I have a small HTPC - it gives me the most flexibility, but I understand that not everybody wants a PC in the equipment rack.

I don't have PS3 so I will let others who do talk about it, but I would expect that if it can handle DTS HD via HDMI, it can probably handle hig rez music files (not sure though - it still needs to have the codecs for them). Somebody earlier mentioned that if going the USB route, Anthem cannot handle high res WAVs or something.

I decided to try PBK + ARC to clean up the low end of my sub. I also ended up rotating it 90 degrees to face into the room away from the right wall. This seemed to do the trick. I also turned up the volume level on the sub, so that now ARC has set the volume trims all to -1, 0 or +1. Turns out I have a faulty woofer in right surround, which is buzzing with approx. 100 Hz signal (shows up around 150 Hz). New woofer is on the way. Fortunately, it doesn't happen in anything I've listened to yet--only the sweep tones.

Room is 13.5' W x 17' L x 18' H. Pos #1 is about 12' from front. I'm running an MRX 700 with Studio 60, CC-690, ADP-590, Sub 12.

The results are sounding pretty great. The opening battle scene from Master and Commander is literally awesome.

im now in ottawa, calling stores if i can get an mrx300, but to no avail =( no stocks everywhere

I think your results look very good. Sub looks awesome. Now sit back and listen. The woofer will come soon and then do another measure. You've got things looking very good at this point.
John

i've been experimenting heavily this last month with arc and find that the "movie" target window is really what makes the changes. even if you make setting changes in "music", "movie" settings is what arc calculates. also, i find that room gain really only sets the target response and can be increased quite a bit to help raise peak levels and nulls. for example, arc set my room gain around 3.8 but after much tweaking i set it to 11.8 and it makes the target response much better on my mains and sub. has anyone of the experienced arc users noticed this?

and secondly, if i buy another sub and stack it on top of my existing one (colate them together), will that increase output across the board say 3db. so, if i have a null at 80db, that would effectively raise it to 83 db?

... so as he described it's a very faint tick at the moment the trailers end and the main soundtrack starts provided he's standing right under the surround speaker. So far with the info at hand I agree with my co-worker, it's audible yet not serious enough to instigate an engineering change since this same tick is all that would be reproduced in anyone's test setup. It's not ranked on our change list because it's not even on it.

Please stay in touch with tech support if there's more to this. In general when someone reports a noise the first question is whether it's a hum, buzz, hiss, tick, crackle, pop, etc and most importantly how far one has to stand to hear it along with speaker model or efficiency. Sometimes it's hard to tell from initial reports whether it's gunshot-loud vs only heard with ear against tweeter.

Hey Nick
Understood. I guess I hear it more than most people, because the surround speakers are only 3ft behind my head.

Hi,

haven't played with the room gain so I can't comment on this.

On this issue you have to be careful with the additional sub as you will definitely add 3dB of gain however you may also excite the axial mode in the room which could add a significant peak if you place the sub on top of the other you are now changing the height axial mode which may be detrimental to good bass. See this lecture from Dr. Floyd Toole on getting the bass right which may help your planning. Two subs are much better than one provided you can arrange them properly. And you will always have nulls there is no way around it. The best thing to do, from my experience, is to eliminate the nulls as best you can via location of the sub, and then equalize/attenuate the peak(s). If your sub has a parametric equalizer built in you can really use this to your advantage by getting rid of the highest peak which then gives ARC a much flatter response to work with.

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

Tony

I hooked up my MRX 500 on Saturday, and ran ARC yesterday. If I get to it tonight, I will post the charts. As far as the setup went, I thought everything ran very smoothly. I used my desktop to install the firmware update, then the ARC update. I never installed the CD. I still need to do the multimedia update.
You can add me to the ARC believer list. Wow! Very impressive indeed. I only did some minor listening so far. The first thing I did was put on the DSOTM 5.1 SACD. The sound was incredible. I turned it up to reference briefly, and the whole house was shaking. My wife was in the prime listening spot, she just smiled and said "Now I see why we got this."
We just briefly sampled some different sources, and they all sounded fine. I haven't yet checked out a BD rental w/trailers. However when watching satellite and switching between HD and STD def channels, there is a small pop. Not very loud, but there nonetheless.
Overall, very very happy.
-Peter

@Nick, I have not yet reported this directly to Anthem, but I will add to HeffeMusic's comments that this is not a quite pop that I hear. Not gun shot loud either. My surrounds, like HeffeMusics are close to my head, about 4 feet away, however the pop is at the same volume (or possibly slightly louder) as most of the surround sounds that come out of the speaker (in otherwords not faint).

I provided a few detials in the following post:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=1529

I still need to do a bit more of a scientific analysis before I really grasp what scenerios it occures in. For now it is most noticable when skipping ahead on my DVR as I do that a lot in daily use.

The highest you should go is 4dB. Even though it may appear your charts look better, 11dB is way too high and will distort the natural sounds in you room that Room Gain is designed to preserve.
John

I agree unless you like bass that much.

I like what the source was designed to sound like
John

Nick... it is definitely not subtle or what I would consider acceptable from an AVR.. it's not something that needs to be sought out, but a rather audible snap.

I also found it is happening on my DVR when I pause and come back listening to DD, and when watching a BR and pausing during the film and resuming (both discs I tested were DTS-HD MA...) So not codec changes, but all the time.

I will make a recording of it and post a link here, and send off another email to tech support with the link.

Really happy you guys are monitoring this thread, BTW...

The problem is that there's no standard for what happens to a bitstream when it's interrupted due to scanning, pausing etc. Please report your DVR model number to tech@anthemav.com along with conditions that cause not-so-faint popping.

Non-DVR pops may be unrelated as they have to do with switching between codecs including DTS Master Audio, something not used in television. Every detail helps!

(The reason for asking that problems be sent to tech support is because we *occasionally* monitor the threads whereas our inbox is where we spend nearly all of our time.)

Here are the charts for my first attempt at ARC.
Speakers are: Paradigm Monitor 9, CC190, ADP190. Sub is a old Yamaha HTIB one, not even sure of the model. The room is a real bugger to deal with. It's about 13' x 35', with the front soundstage in the corner of the 13' edge. Unfortunately, it's really the only spot for it. It sounds much better after ARC was run, but I'm always open to analysis/comments/suggestions to improve it. Thanks.
-Peter

Charts?

I meant graphs...it's been a long day.

I couldn't see the graphs using my iTouch, it wasn't the terminology I was referring to Try moving your centre channel to see if you can get rid of the dip at the room gain region. You can use quick measure to test this quickly. If it is close to a wall, move it out away from it and measure as you go. I had this same issue with my CC690 and most of that dip disappeared.
John

Nick,

I am sitting about 6-7 feet away from my fronts and can hear the ticks/snaps when change to next chapter on blu ray. DVR is NOT hooked up, just blu ray.

I agree that not acceptable for $2000.00 AVR.

Spoke to Anthem TS yesterday. Need to load the latest Multi Media update and see what happens as far as the unit continuing to lock up or not. Where the problem is intermittent (started again 2 weeks after the firmware update), I may not know if it helps or not for a while. The amp for my sub will be back tomorrow. I'll load the MM update and run the ARC again once everything is in place.

It doesn't appear Anthem would ignore the noises we're talking about here. What Nick was responding to had apparently been described to him as a faint noise discernible only within several feet of the speaker.

They aren't.

Which MRX do you have? ^ They are.