Help with bright sounding setup!

Welcome.
I am sorry to say but the amp is not bright sounding, period. It is your room and speaker, most likely the new speakers.

Use the Sony's internal EQ to roll of the brightness.

Give them time before you make a decision. They still need some break in time, like about 100-200 hours, if they are new out of the box. Speaker break in is real! You have three linear motors on each of those boxes that will need some time to settle down and relax.

The Aviano 6 speakers are not bright-sounding speakers; not at all. They will definitely not sound that way with a good amplifier. The quality of the speakers is about two orders of magnitude better than your receiver; quite a mismatch.

The "brightness" you are hearing is actually harmonic distortion in the amplifier circuits of the Sony receiver, IMO. Hooking a $250 receiver to a $1000 pair of speakers...?? What would you expect? Garbage in....garbage out. Those 7 amplifiers cost Sony about $15 each to manufacture, so don't expect decent sound from them.

I suggest that you get a loan of a better amplifier and try it out with your speakers and see if they don't sound a lot better; they certainly will.

I suggest a Cambridge Audio or NAD integrated amplifier or receiver. The NAD T-748 or T-765 might be a good choice, or a Cambridge 651A.

I think it's speakers, room and placement. You may think about acoustical treatments for your place. That will likely be best solution.

Simply touching the receiver's tone controls might make some sense, as has already been suggested. I'd bet that adjustments of a centered control to no sooner than 11 o'clock might be enough.

Of course there aren't a lot of bragging rights in using tone controls to errrr, control tone. ;-)

On a really good day it might be a simple matter of changing the toe of the speakers so that the tweeters aren't screaming down into your ears when you sit in your sweet spot.

The costs nothing to try and takes about 5 minutes to try. If those two doesn't work, then things might get a more spendy.

IOW, your suggestion makes a lot of sense.

^^^

it's not the "quality of the amp"..

Boy, that myth that you can count on night and day differences between good new amps is really hard to kill off, isn't it?

^^^

yup... cockroaches are easier to kill....

garthvader86, what he meant was, there are retailer shills on this forum. They try to use this forum as advertising outlet. You have to learn to spot and ignore them. They usually mention brand names and prices along with bunch of audiophile myths to make it seem necessary to buy them.

See if you can try out a couple different receivers or an amp. See if that alone fixes the problem. If not try out a receiver with Audyssey MultEQ XT or some other decent quality room correction software. Also what is your room like? It may be you need some room treatment to get rid of reflections.

yet, it continues...

You cannot kill off the supernatural

I second the break-in for at least a 100 hrs before I would do anything.
I normally play new speakers over night with classical music. A violin solo will tell you when they are ready.
Then you'll need to blend in the sub.
If it's still bright, looking at room reflections would be my next step.

I think it's up there with whatever was left in the house fridge a few years ago, the creature from planet 9, and the original Terminator...

To the OP:

- Tone controls.
- Speaker placement.
- Room treatment.

And finally:

- It's entirely possible these speakers have a treble bump and you just don't like how they sound; just because they cost more or have rave reviews in the rags doesn't mean they're "better" than anything else.

Yeah, those stupid audio engineers and other audio professionals keep wasting their money on expensive amplifiers that those poor deluded fools think sound a lot better. Just because they make their living in audio doesn't mean they are right. Who do they think they are, anyway? How could they possibly know better than our resident self-appointed experts here?

Those professional audio people who believe in that myth have kept companies like Bryston and Audio Research in business for 30 years and more. It's amazing what expensive stuff you can sell to people who really know what is what, isn't it? Simply shocking what experienced knowledgeable true experts will do!

Its incredible the things the professionals who make their living in audio believe in. Too bad they don't listen to the self-appointed oracles that think all amplifers sound the same; they could save so much money if they would just listen to those self-appointed experts and buy that great-sounding cheap junk.

It is absolutely true that you can build a good-sounding amplifier for $15 or $30 per channel; Yamaha and Sony and lots of others do it every day in their HT receivers. What engineer could possibly design something that sounds a lot better? Just a myth. You betcha.

Those audio professionals who pay 10 or 20 times as much for their amplifiers are just idiots; they haven't a clue.They just go on believing in that myth, as if there was something to it. Those audio pros may keep that myth alive forever, if the real experts here don't sit them down and set them straight.

It's amazing what expensive stuff you can sell to people who don't know what is what, isn't it? All it takes is to flood the magazines and internet with high praising reviews regardless of its validity, like the ones shown below.
" These bozos repeatedly make comments to the effect that the amplifier is a very minor factor in the overall sound quality of the audio system. That is precisely opposite to what my ears have told me over the years, and totally destroys their credibility in my mind. "

" Using a SPL meter and repeatable test tones is an excellent method for matching levels, as any qualified audio engineer will tell you. "

Electronics do have differences. You cannot say all computers out there running windows7 perform the same.

Sadly, true. It is true that for about $300 a person get a really good professional grade power amp, or one can get one with similar performance for $3,000 and both kinds of amps are sold.

QSC used to take a lot of $#@!! about the sound quality of their power amps. They engineered and built a goodly number of ABX boxes and sent them into the field. I know of no case where anybody found that a good competitive amp sounded different, let alone better.


A key factor is that most audio professionals don't make their living testing amplifiers, they make their living doing something where audible differences abound rather than vanish, and the amplifiers are just tools.

Let's face it, one can fix a car with a good but cheap made-you-know-where wrench, or one can use a really nice one from say, Mac tools. The car gets fixed if you use either tool properly with good diagnosis and good procedures. There used to be huge differences between very cheap and really good mechanic's tools, but most of those have been erased.



Guys who make recordings and run sound systems.


Some of the locals do all that, too. Like me. Thousands of live sound gigs and thousands of recordings for 100s of clients. No I don't do huge arenas and I don't record top hits. I do run events that are attended by 100's of people and make recordings for schools and churches. Its all about good sound, whether the market is big or small, and I use many of the same tools.


You are poorly informed if you think that Bryston and AR have significant sales in the professional audio market. I'm sure there are a few high end mastering engineers with Bryston and AR amps in their innner sanctums. So what?

Let's see your audited numbers for professional audio sales by Bryston, AR, Crown, and QSC. Orders of magnitude apart. A handful of exceptions don't make a rule!


The vast majority of the time knowledgeable experts bypass Bryston and AR.



The vast overwhelming majority of the time knowledgeable experts bypass boutique Bryston and AR and spend their money on mainstream products like those from Crown and QSC. Anybody who asserts otherwise simply never lifts the covers on professional sound systems.

Nobody is saying otherwise.

However, if we restrict ourselves to signficant audible differences, the amount of actual differences shrinks vastly.


Right and some amplifiers have more power than others.

Does a web site look different if you run with 8 3.8 GHz processors or two 2.2 GHz processors?

I own both of those computers and use them daily. One is my office machine and one is my video rendering farm.

In either case the speed of the network connection probably makes the more noticeable difference in speed. In either case the display makes the more noticeable difference in appearance.

^^^

no... that question was answered LONG ago in this thread...

Totally illogical premise to draw totally illogical conclusion.
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi (this is exactly what you're doing).

Irrelevant to even be addressed in this discussion.




No, you do not need an amplifier.*

* Unless your power demands are really huge and this is not complicated to figure out; if I didn't hit it in my first reply, let me know.

Prove it that what i said is irrelevant. Just knowing how many fallacies out there does not make you the smart intelligent one.

That's the double-edged sword of spikes; sometimes they help, sometimes they don't. Glad you got it sorted out.


What do you mean? We're talking about speakers and their amplification, not computers, so how does anything related to computers influence this discussion? It's an irrelevant diversion. Yes, your original point about all computers in that situation WAS true (with qualification), but it doesn't support the secondary argument you made. It's like if I tell you that the sky is blue, that's true, but then if I make some outlandish statement; like that this sentence is false. That doesn't support that argument. It's a common trap that many debaters fall into though - they establish a strong position of truth and then "hinge" from that to something unrelated (which may or may not be true). This is why analogies in general are usually not helpful (and why, in general, I tend not to favor generalizations, whenever possible, as a rule of thumb ()).

The Wikipedia article explains it with a great example from cinema (it's a funny movie on an unrelated note). That's why I linked it.

Regarding the "electronics have differences" - that's a pretty board statement. And sure, it's true at face value, but you have to unpack it a bit more:

What kinds of differences, and more importantly, how do they matter?

So in this case, the question is, do different specs on an amplifier translate into audible differences? We can both measure to answer that question, and then measure to answer "What kinds?" as well. In many cases, with modern equipment, the answer is "No" and "None" though - it's just the result of good engineering from all sides.

Your computer diversion is the same way, and Arny already provided a good example in response to that.

I'm not at all trying to tear you down here, just responding to your question about relevancy. A more relevant "plug" would be to talk about differences between amplifiers or speakers, as that's what we're talking about - provide some documentation or anecdotal evidence that supports your claim. I'm not saying that will universally "win" the debate in your favor, but it would strengthen your position and allow a back-and-forth on the topic we've set out with.