What if you don't have Audessey EQ?

You have a home theater/5.1 receiver that you want to add EQ to? Bad idea. Anything out there is going to be expensive, and probably won't give you the results you're seeking. Audyssey is much more than just EQ, it's time domain and level correction.

Room treatment might be just as effective, and probably less expensive.

Treating or optimizing an average listening room acoustically is most of the time no cheap task either, if done right. But it cures the problems at the roots, not afterwards.
Sometimes just moving around some furniture and speakers might do the job quite well so.

Probably the cheapest way to approach this would be to replace your existing processor with an Audyssey equipped unit. As mentioned above, the external devices tend to be far more expensive than a new AVR.

What you are trying to do is a complete waste of time.

I get a big laugh out of sub-$600 receivers with gee-whiz room correction systems anyway.

It is like buying a $15,000 new car and putting $5000 tires on it and expecting high performance.

If you want decent sound, buy a receiver like the Cambridge 650R, which sounds good to start with because the money and the engineering needed has been put into the amplifier circuits instead of bullpucky and bells and whistles.

That is a better approach than buying something with 5 or 7 pathetic $20 amplifiers and then trying to use some sort of correction system to try and turn a pig into a racehorse. Lots of luck with that!

I've asked this before - perhaps this time you will respond.

How does amplifier quality, even if it was a differentiator, address room issues which are magnitudes larger in impact to audio reproduction than any differences between competent amplifiers?

IMO a $20K Classe preamp + power amp combo will sound like cow poo in a room with bare floors & plate glass windows everywhere with the speakers shoved into the corners compared to a $250 Pioneer receiver w/NO room correction activated in the typical living room with wall-to-wall carpet & the same speakers pulled away from the side & rear walls.

Or floor to ceiling carpet.

That too!

In a perfect world we would all have accoustically designed theater rooms.

In the real world we have hard plaster walls, large openings to the remainder of the house and hard floors so we have room correction algorithyms.

Fortunatelly for me the family room is the only room with a carpet floor and a on the entire first floor (the rest is 100y.o. oak flooring). Of course my wife would like to change the family room by raising the ceiling and install tile or wood flooring there too. So we have room correction.

The answer to the OP is to buy a new AVR.

Sub,

Dude!! You are hitting it on all angles right now! Im seeing you posting everywhere! Hope you are absorbing all that you are learning right now MY first suggestion, and the cheapest way to try some things is first speaker placement. If right now they are shoved into corners, pull em out, put them in a few different spots.

next try toeing the speakers in towards the listening position, or sometimes, even toeing out works depending on the room.

next get a heavy blanket or two and drape them behind or to the outside of the speakers and see if taming the first order reflections makes a good difference. if you have several blankets to demo out, use em all and see what you get! This is a no cost, easy way to TEMPORARILY treat parts of your room. pick a few songs or movie scenes that you know up and down, and see from the main listening position if it makes a difference. If you decide some sound absorbtion is needed start looking at acoustimac.com for some pretty cheap absorbtion panels, you may only need a few to make enough difference for you.

The real answer is to replace the power cord and speaker cables with some Diamondback Twirled, gold foil shielded 250 kcmil microstranded ultra high purity copper? Put some sand bags on the receiver and a bowl of water in front...

It's "night and day" difference.

For system setup, go hear, and read this, it's a really great resource: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=824554

What's your "system"? I also think a new AVR is what you're looking for, though, if you want the room correction feature.

You might be able to find a Sherwood R972 AVR with the Trinnov room correction (said to be one of the best out there) on closeout now for a good price, but if you bought a Trinnov component for room correction (with more to it, though) I believe the price becomes about 10x that particular AVR if not more...

The above is pretty much all nonsense, at least as it applies to modern amplifiers from reputable manufacturers.

Amp technology is well understood and there is no magic there. Most modern amps will be indistinguishable from each other unless driven beyond their limits, which should not be an issue for most home theaters.

Room correction is pretty much the most important differentiator among AVRs, again, assuming relatively normal (efficient) speakers and space.

Buy a new AVR. Audyssey is fine, but there are better (and worse) ones out there as well. Check out Trinnov (my favorite) and ARC as well.

Would that be with or without cable elevators? LOL! Nice!

There is a reason why bands and venues like churches have racks of equipment. Not to make the music sound cool, and add attitude, it is to adjust due to venue limitations. For example, we just added a parametric EQ to our rack of equipment for a church, and looking to add a Compressor/Limitor/Gate/Enhancer also here soon to our equipment rack, and down the road a possibility that we are also looking at for certain uses is a DeStressor. Now because we think they are cool or want to spend money, but due to we have to due to problem areas caused by the roomspace our church's band & choir performs in.

If you went out and just bought a Compressor/Limiter and/or Enhancer & a Parametric EQ, and you could have spent the money on a decent AVRS & materials to help the room.