Pioneer Steps Up Elite AVRs - Page 3

Many of us already have. I sold my SC-57, after owning it for a little over six months, when I became convinced that a Denon 4311 with XT32 (and later with Pro) could give me a deeper, more integrated soundstage and tighter, more accurate bass than what the Pio AVR -- even with an external standalone bass EQ I bought -- could do. The dozens of ex-Pioneer Elite users on AVS in the last year testifying to how much they notice the sound difference speaks for itself, and the difference in sound in the immersion bubble for me is quite noticeable. And based on specs, nothing has changed for the upcoming set of Elites to hit the market.

Having said that, since Walkamo says he's back on receivers as his beat, we should at least give him the courtesy of hearing him out, and remembering he's a marketing voice, not an engineer that can change firmware on demand. But I hope he understands that on an 'audiophile' forum, you're gonna get audiophile concerns and scrutiny.

Stuart

The backbone of feature additions are the receiver's DSP and other processor chips. Typically, those are close-to-maxed capability when designed/shipped. You can't typically add significant features without totally replacing the DSPs. See what happened with the Denon AVP/5308A.

I don't want to just beat up on Chris Walker. After all, he didn't shrink away from the questions and the challenge.

Isn't it interesting though after all this time, they want to check a competitor's Audyssey system out for comparison and learn more about their own system

As someone who's spent 24 yrs in technical sales that required a whole lot of training, product & application knowledge to be in our business & sell to customers, I find that an interesting reveal. Why has it taken this long, I have to wonder...

One of the 1st rules of salesmanship and marketing - Know Your Competition

How can Pioneer possibly understand the benefits of their own system and some of its limitations vs their main competitors if it's taken this long to be curious as to what the "other" team can do?

I confess to being and a little amazed.

@sam...

yup...

firmware can't create hardware out of nowhere... something that those who say "it's just a firmware upgrade" tend to forget...

@stuart... well said... although it appears as if one or two posters sure are riled up about the iApp....

Possibly, but perhaps getting rid of some of those 'room DSPs' might be useful to free up space. With modern DVDs and BluRays having 5.1 or greater mixes, who really needs Jazz Club, Stadium, Rock Club, Wide Screen etc...especially when there's Dolby and DTS modes for 5.1+ music and HT.

Chris,

Will it trans-code video for zones 2-4? In you example above, I would assume that the HDMI output to Zone 4 would have to be an HDMI input, not a component. Correct? Still very cool.

I have heard the value of 9 channels of sound, but not heard the value of a sub eq. I value that which I know is a good improvement over that which I do not know and therefor cannot miss.

It is like saying someone should give up chocolate ice cream and seek strawberry ice cream when they are quite happy with chocolate ice cream. Sure, maybe the strawberry is good...but why give up a known good for a potential good?

i will admit, i am a bit as well...

generally speaking, one locks the door after the first horse has escaped, one doesn't wait for the entire herd to slowly melt away one by one...

I agree that those are all useless, but you're talking about freeing up processing capabilities for 15 year old soundfields. They worked on products from 15-20 years ago (the same way they do today) so eliminating them doesn't really free up processing power. The equivalent of removing your sun visors in attempt to reduce weight in order to make your car go faster

I agree with soundfields for all but the all channel stereo - which is actually a great party mode.

I'm not neccessarily--companies have their own culture, and in some of them a particular 'enemy' just doesn't exist when you're trying to get by quarter to quarter, and having to fend off economic and tech trends along with the mfrs below you on the totem pole. Plus which in the real world, it's about marketing what can be perceived by consumers to be different from competitors, even if there's R&D or qualitative tradeoffs and you lose some customers as a result. Equity's the name of the game when you're not just selling value. That's a fancy way of saying that to a 'typical' buyer, Marvell QDEO and smoothing Internet streams may sell to buyers on the fence more than 'we EQ subs and sound better'.

And to be fair, before XT32 and the 4311 being pro capable, I could argue that the DAC filter switching, EQ Professional, and ALC were just as cool as Audyssey XT.

unfortunately, your ice cream analogy isn't quite correct... whereas i have little doubt that a well setup 9 channel solution would be nice (and i would likely do it if i had room), it's impact vs. eq'd bass is not comparable... it is more common than not for the "average living space" to have 30db swings in their un'eq bass response... all the bullets flying over your head in the world ain't gonna cover that up.... it's not a "different flavor of ice cream" difference...

here is a more workable ice cream analogy...

eq'd/tweaked bass = freshly scooped ice cream out of a real cold freezer on a late summer afternoon....

un-eq'd/non-tweaked bass = the melted ice cream that falls on the sidewalk and fido ferociously laps up...

No, it's more like being told someone shouldn't put their hand on the stove because it's hot, but one decides to find out for oneself rather than accepting common knowledge.

Regardless, you don't have to give up 9 channel output to have access to sub EQ, so your point is moot.

Chris (both of you)--it's not just the EQ'd bass. Otherwise I'd still be happy with my 57 and AS-EQ1. It's that the bass is EQ'd and level matching to the mains, while the RC is optimizing flat response off all speakers in one run (albeit with multiple measurements, even if all speakers and sub don't always wind up perfectly flat), and the adjustment to the overall EQ as volume goes up/down from reference level as well to provide a better listening experience. The bass EQ is a necessary but not sufficient part of the room correction IMO.

Chris (Walkamo),

Kidding aside and genuinely trying to be helpful to your research:

While you're at it, you should check into why independent crossovers per speaker pair make more sense than a single, universal crossover.

That should be one of your questions to Air Studios and Pioneer engineering.

When speakers can be mixed & matched even within the same speaker company, the time for a single crossover is long over. Your competitors have offered independent crossovers for a long time.

Even before the Susano SC-09TX came out, Denon has independent Xovers. Having owned the 49 & 59Txi, it was one of my expectations that Pioneer would finally update MCACC in the SC models and one of my very few disappointments with the SC-09 that it was still a single Xover.

Why this is important? Even with hi-quality speakers, the center speaker may be more bass limited than the surrounds from the same company and in the same speaker line. Not all have the same capability.

For example, Magnepan's original center speaker was good to only 160 Hz while their wall mounted surround panels could reach to 80. Even after they updated the speaker, it was realistically limited to about 100. And their latest one, the full ribbon tweetered CC5 matched for their top l/r models, is bass limited to 200! How can one crossover handle 2 speakers that are capable of 35 Hz, 1 @ 200 and 4 at 80? It can't. Even if you pick 80, the bass in the center at 100-200 is gone, not to be retrieved.

And this is not a unique example.

This is why we are being critical - because Pioneer is ignoring these facts while your competitors haven't.

Pioneer MCACC is simply becoming inadequate to do the flexible bass management desirable with increasingly more channels being added.

Does Pioneer not acknowledge that someone's choice for height speakers may just have less bass capability than the center & surrounds???

Besides sub EQ this is the only other big limitation I see with MCACC. IF Pioneer just fixed these 2 issues, your system would hold up well going forward.

just 2c from an informed enthusiast

+100
as always...you have a way with words I can only aspire to - succinctly put!

Yeah, but old algorithms may be bloated dinosaurs by today's standards and take up disproportionate space that could be freed up for more efficient, modern code.. Only a designer might know for sure....which I'm not.

That's why he's been the Pied Piper.....

true, and definitely a defendable position... after all, even when i used a xt equipped unit, i still left my anti-mode (that i used in the pio days) in the chain... only after i started using xt32 could i remove that...

heck, there's good reason why many of us were unapologetic pio loyalists for a long time... sota technology that worked out of the box... year after year... if there was a goodie, the pio had it... they always ahead of the curve...

sadly, that's no longer true... had the global economy not gone in the toilet, who knows what may have happened, as from hardware perspective, pio was at the absolute top of their game with the susano and the kuro... had they not been struggling simply to survive (and having to jump in bed with sharp as a result), maybe we would have seen some innovations over the past couple years on the software side that matched their work on the hardware side...

that doesn't excuse many of the other things that we often are condemned for pointing out... but i can understand why they may have fallen down on the innovations front...

proprietary systems are great when you have money to support them... but there's good reason why almost everyone uses off the shelf software solutions now (vs. the good old days in the 80's when we wrote everything from scratch)....

denon has been struggling on the balance sheet as badly as pio... if not worse... but since the software (in this case being audyssey) isn't dependent upon them financially supporting it (directly, at least), they can "innovate by licensing"...

yea true... subjectively (treads gently into an area where he rarely goes), the "overall" package of xt32 is more than the sum of it's component parts taken individually... add in the money and effort to do a pro calibration, and the gulf widens further...

but you only know that because you ventured further down the rabbit hole... and in doing so joined bfreedma, steve, hudda and nuance on the short list of people who've made me spend money....

At first Walkamo, thanks for the clarification, I am going to ask/answer your question here below if you can give me some feedback on them would be great!


Well Chris thanks for this answer, you're perfectly clear there and it is more than true what your saying about adding new features. But there is a but, if we compare Pioneer with the competition like Marantz, Denon and Onkyo with their Firmware updates, they are adding features sometimes what Pioneer does not.


I am sorry to tell you this, but I just don't believe this This is purely a Marketing speech(And yes I know when it is that I work for one of the biggest US. Based Computer manufactures), at my work we as Techies call is MBS(Marketing Bull Sh*t). I am certainly that all of the 'new' features in the newest app is perfectly usable for the previous and even the generation before that A/V receivers. Maybe there are a little nuances in some sort, but if the app 'detects' that it is used with a A/V receiver which does not support a certain feature it just shouldn't show it and work with the other features without any problem. The problem in this is the following, the old application is not supported anymore and by that I mean that there are no new version coming out anymore for new OS versions of the mobile devices(no support for newer Android versions or iOS versions) which make the A/V receivers as disposable as a plastic bag you got from your supermarket! If I can't 'manage' my A/V receiver not anymore whenI buy a new mobile device or upgrade my Android/iOS version that would be very bad thing in my eyes. Pioneer should take Panasonic for a example how it should be.


Exactly the same thing you said last year When can you tell more about this ?


Okay this means that there is no sub EQ for the new products ? And no schedule yet for when there will be any form of this ? And what about a individual X-over instead of the prehistoric overall X-over setting we have in all Pioneers ever sold ?


Well the problem is you appear only to be available and visible when new products are launched, but you're never there when there are owners with questions about problems which are not solved or even never will be solved because Pioneer is not listening to it's customers like they should.


Well I am hoping that Chris will give me/us some more insight

you teed me up...


i've gotta find me a pp avatar...

just another agent at work...

And that's the critical difference. Without Audyssey - which as you point out is licensed from a third party that licenses and periodically updates its software, at least incrementally from XT to XT32 and for newer features like DSX - Denon might well be getting the same criticisms that many here have directed at Pioneer, except that it might be former Denon users complaining about the superiority of YMAO or (dog help us) Trinnov on a Sherwood.

You mentioned iControl before - are the flavors available from iTunes developed by Denon or third party approved plug-ins?

Thanks for the note Stuart...

I am first and foremost an AV enthusiast....

I have no problem in taking criticism on these forums about our products. What I don't like is that when I do answer a question honestly (Like the iContolAV backwards compatibility question), I am told that I am not being honest.

Chris Walker
Pioneer Electronics

Junking the faux surround reverb modes would not only free up DSP for something useful, it would eliminate confusion, needless complexity and preserve the sound quality we pay so dearly to achieve.

I'm an old quaddie (quadraphile ) and when quad died, I demo'd several hi-dollar reverb units from Audio Pulse and A/D/S ($1K+ in 1980 dollars) to see if they could imitate the surround effects from quad. With the A/D/S unit, you could vary all kinds of things, it was an amazing device. You could literally spend more time tweaking it than listening to music. In the space of minutes I was able to reduce a beautiful recording to sounding like an auditorium It wasn't hard to conclude that gimmicky reverb was a bad idea.

I have no use for these modes. Even the best, Yamaha's DSP based on acoustic modeling of real venues isn't needed or terribly useful with cinema sound nor music. And I AM A BIG multichannel surround music fan.

Pioneer should do the home theater-audio enthusiast a favor - get rid of them - and offer meaningful enhancements instead.

Well, some people don't like what they hear and shoot the messenger. Whether or not I agree that the way iControlAV is written is 'correct', I respect that you're at least trying to answer these questions to the best of your ability. People forget that you work for Pioneer but aren't in absolute control of the choices that Pioneer makes.

Stuart

A couple of points here

Firmware updates and upgrades

First off, pioneer, just fix the systems you have. The network software is buggy in the receivers and if you bought a blu ray player, I really feel sorry for you

I have worked on ram and processor limited systems and with some ingenuity it is surprising what you can do. Perhaps a simple compiler optimization. Or some hand coding in assembly language

Multiple crossovers does not sound hard to accomplish, within the existing scheme, the hard part is already done

As far as upgrades, there really doesn't seem to be a feature that is a processing upgrade in the new line, hence the confusion on why the icontrolav2012 app won't function with those ancient sc57s

When a company drops support, and has to work on it, for the flagship receiver that is only 8 months old, that tells me all I need to know

Adios pioneer

I have said as much myself...only to be met by people saying I must prefer sub EQ over 9 channel sound because they say so. Odd, I know.

Having many choices is good. We will wait and see how good the new Pioneers are before declaring they are not good. Same with the new Denons and the new Onkyos. Reviews will be read, we will all learn.

All that said, the 4311 still looks to occupy the sweet spot even with the new generation out there.

What you're saying here, is not really the case I think.
Nobody is shooting you down on this matter, we are shooting Pioneer down on this matter you're just the messenger and receiver for this. There are no personal hard feeling on that matter at least not from me

Maybe if we all wrote letters to Pioneer, they would put him in absolute control?