Official Pioneer SC-68/67 Thread - Page 8

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yes to both - sounds great - I have the 93 w/hdmi. so haven't can't tell you how great the 95 dac is

^^
absolutely!! great choice in players

it would be a great combination but honestly all blu-ray players & modern receivers do 5.1 which is the most basic & common surround setup in a living/family room environment. The Oppo happens to be a top rated, full featured robust player plus you can't go wrong with a SC-67 as your very 1st surround receiver coming from stereo. That would be a great setup that will take care of your surround audio needs.

actually with new receivers like the 67, if you decide to add more channels past 5.1, you can go as many as 9.1 (with 2 subs), which can include height & wide channels.

your understanding of 5.1 surround is correct but as clarification, what you call the "rears" (the 4th & 5th channels out of 5.1) are more accurately called surrounds or side surrounds to distinguish them from true rear or back channels. The preferred location for them is more to the sides, from 90 deg to ~120 deg from the main seating position to the sides but slightly rearwards. Rears or back surrounds are the 6th & 7th channels in a 7.1 setup. When you say "rears" most people will assume you mean those back channels.

now if you're really going to mount the surrounds directly behind you, you can, just as long as you remember to wire those speakers to the surround outputs not the rear (or back) outputs. this is important because in 7.1, most of the time, those back rear channels are derived from the side surrounds.

5.1 = fronts, center, surrounds (side surrounds)
7.1 = fronts, center, surrounds, rears (back channels)
9.1 = a) fronts, center, surrounds, rears, height channels or b) fronts, center, surrounds, rears, width channels
11.1 = all of the above with heights & widths at the same time

you can find excellent diagrams of various setups, recommended speaker locations & terminology on Dolby & DTS's websites - here's a couple of links that may help,

http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/technology/home-theater/listing.html
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/consumer/setup/connection-guide/home-theater-speaker-guide/index.html
http://www.dts.com/professionals/sound-technologies/audio-formats.aspx

especially when you start adding matrix processing like Dolby ProLogic IIx (to get 7.1 from 5.1) IIz (adds heights) & DTS NeoX for the same things. Most Blu-rays & DVD's are natively 5.1 but some are encoded as 7.1 with dedicated rear channels. The majority of the time, we add ProLogic IIx or DTS Neo to get our 7.1 channels from 5.1.

Most receiver manuals, including Pioneer's, have speaker layout diagrams & descriptions of channels:



hope this helps as you move from stereo into surround sound
Edited by ss9001 - 9/25/12 at 1:15pm

Can you see volume and or listening mode display on screen through hdmi?

yes, absolutely

Does the pioneer have a setting to adjust the height of the center channel sound...using height speakers?

if I understand your question, no, not per se but

- there is an adjustable height setting for the height channel speakers but they aren't going to magically channel the signal sent to the center channel speaker into the height speakers. I know of no AVR or prepro that would do exactly what you asked - use the ht speakers as a virtual center channel

- some yamaha AVR's could adjust the ht of the dedicated center channel

- the big dollar Trinnov processor & its discontinued Sherwood 972 Trinnov sibling can change virtual speaker positioning

edit - see my next post

Pioneer has virtual height, virtual width & virtual depth settings for the front l/r speakers, tho, so virtual ht may have some effect on dialog positioning, especially if you went with a phantom center.

I plan on installing height speakers before end of year, maybe by Nov so can better address ht channel questions then

in the meantime, I will try the virtual height very soon, probably this weekend, on a dynamic movie track and will post my impressions.
Edited by ss9001 - 9/27/12 at 5:51am

I may have spoken too quickly when I said it wouldn't adjust center height.

I forgot about the Dialog Enhancement feature. Paraphrasing a bit from the manual -

"It localizes dialog in the center channel to make it stand out from other background sounds"...By moving from UP1...through UP4, you can make the source source seem to relocate upwards.

Now, I've used this feature in the SC-09 but Pioneer doesn't describe it in the exact same way in the 09 manual, basically just saying it makes it stand out more from the background. So I don't know if the version in the 68 is any different or the same.

But I'll try it and let you know my impressions Altho, my center speaker is suspended above the Kuro so already seems to emanate from a high position But we'll see, don't know until I try it...if this feature has been updated to have a ht component, then that'll be a pleasant surprise.

Stay tuned

yes to both

In the Pioneer, you just turn the Video Converter off. HDMI then bypasses the video processor (Marvell Qdeo), and is untouched by any processing in the receiver. In fact, this was how Pioneer treated HDMI signals in previous models prior to the SC-37 I believe. It was their philosophy to "do no harm" to the video, preferring all processing take place in the player or the display. But they bowed to competitive & user pressure to have the video processor also be an option for HDMI and so you can use it or not, your choice And you will still see your OSD of volume, listening modes, setup menus, etc. with it turned off.

I've been a Magnepan speaker owner since '82 & have an all - Maggie setup that I've driven with the SC-09 Ice amps & now the new 68. The 68 handles them all with no problem. While not electrostats per se, they are high power demand planars, all 4 ohm and pretty low efficiency. If it can handle my Maggies, your M'L's shouldn't be a problem, unless you have their top $$ models for every channel Since M-L's have higher efficiency than Maggies & most of them still use conventional woofer cones for bass I would think you'll be OK. The 68 is THX Ultra 2 certified so it's passed power tests to ~ 3.2 ohms IIRC and also for the 1st time, Pioneer has officially given these receivers 4 ohm rating.

Which M-L models do you have? For comparison, I use Maggie 3.6 as fronts, their CC3 center and MC1's as surrounds. None of them is higher than ~86 dB eff.

I tested the 68 with fronts set to Large & turned the volume up to -3 to -2 just to see if the amps would shut down in protection mode with 2 ch & surround music...they didn't Sounded about the same as a 2 ch hi-powered class A/B amp I have specifically designed for e-stats (an Innersound ESL300, Innersound is now Sanders Sound Systems who makes his own designed e-stat speakers, amp design is Roger Sanders, amp is made by Coda)

Forum member DonH50 also has Maggies & uses a SC-27 with them, IIRC. There are others but I can't recall specific member names
Edited by ss9001 - 9/28/12 at 6:01am

^^
I can't answer you directly, having not looked at the 65 & 67. The knobs on the 68 look & feel like they are metal but even that is not 100% guaranteed.

The ss9001 integrated setup has been open for "business" since last weekend (whew). New cabinet, re-built cabinet & reassembled gear, new cables, and a lot of BS&T getting the SC-68 hooked up to work with the SC-09. Putting the finishing touches to my URC remote

I did discover several weeks ago that what I thought I was observing with the HDMI zone 4 output was not really the way it worked I thought it was acting like a repeater on the output side but it's really an input splitter which makes sense. It turned out that the 68's processing & listening modes didn't do anything at all to zone 4 HDMI. All the processing was still being done by the 09, so that setup wouldn't accomplish my objective - using the 68 as a prepro. For its intended purpose, the zone 4 HDMI is a nice added feature so you can feed another AVR in a bedroom or 2nd room . It does work as a matrix output, main zone & zone 4 can have 2 different sources. I haven't confirmed whether it can do the same source but my gut says it will...if it's truly a splitter.

Ended up going the original plan - 68 preamp outs to the 09's multichannel analogs ins. Go pure direct in the 09 & completely turn off mcacc. and dedicated long HDMI run to the kuro as another input.

It works! I now have the best of both worlds

Next up is looking at adding ht channels somewhere in the setup.

I did try virtual height last night on Hunger Games...it did add a subtle change to the front stage, sort of like adding additional ambience to it, not a reverb effect at all, just added "something" which was noticeable when I turned it off The effect was pleasing but certainly not game changing No surprise there. I'd like to add height speakers in such a position that it adds an overhead effect w/o changing the front stage much...I'm thinking locating the speakers high but more in front of the mains not directly above them might be interesting...Denon AVP owner ohyeah32 has such a setup, in his case locating the hts directly above his side surrounds.

Planning on heights before end of the year