Anthem D2/D2v/AVM50/AVM50v/ARC1 tweaking guide - Page 464

While not identical, I have had issues with my D2 not playing nice with my Tivo S3 set on "native" when I change from a HD channel to a 480i channel (basically, the screen flashes and the processor locks up until I power down the D2 or change inputs). The "lockup" happens whether I use HDMI or component. If I set the Tivo to output 1080i, the problem goes away.

Nick believes it is a software issue that he said would be addressed in a future firmware update. Based on some chatter on the Tivo forums, it may be in part the fault of the most recent Tivo firmware (although I do not see this issue with another S3 connected directly to a Samsung LCD panel).

Alan

I'll start saving up my (depreciating ) US dollars! Hopefully there will be some sort of upgrade/trade-in for us pioneers (aka the ones with the occasional arrow in their backs)...

Say, Levesque - as the owner of this thread, you might want to update the first post to indicate the current firmware (1.31) and the fact that the Room EQ has shipped (and has a name). As people read the reviews that come out on ARC-1 and D2, there may be a surge in new owners looking for information... This thread is an incredible source of information, but more daunting every day.

Yeah had/have the same issue with my Rogers 8300HD PVR via HDMI. Switching channels, opening the menus or PVR recorded screens all caused green screen sync issues. If I got it too often in a short period of time the D2 would sometimes freeze and require a restart to fix.

This eventually led me to try using the Component which realistically with the 1080i PVR output looked pretty much identical from the best I could compare.

Maybe the HDMI is a little sharper or a little more resistant to motion effects, but that is next to impossible to tell for sure unless I could somehow side by side it which I cannot.

My Bell ExpressVu 9200HD PVR had no such issues. Are you listening Rogers hahaa. They really hate each other lol.

Cheers,

Richard

Anyone who is waiting on the ARC, get notice that they are shipping yet? I have been waiting for several weeks.

Michael

Richard,
Just did what Bob suggested. My ps3 had 7.1 checked but I know I set it this way initially. Changed it this morning and tested some 7.1 discs. Surround is more coherent and less jumbled. Thanks once again Bob.
John

Don't forget the D1 owners who have or have ordered Arc-1. The D1 thread is pretty much dead and so I come here looking for tips on the audio side, especially now that Arc has been implemented.

Well just a note for future troubleshooting. Some 7.1 output must have gotten enabled on my PS3, but when I went in to check nothing was.

I think I may have blown past the Automatic option before going back for the manual ones and I guess that reset everything and turned off any 7.1 settings. So when troubleshooting your PS3 settings be sure to go into manual first to see what is there. I haven't confirmed, but hopefully this keeps your existing settings intact unless you change them and save.

This happened because with the IR2BT there is a slight (very slight) delay between a key press and the activity on the PS3 and it's easy to blow past stuff.

Cheers,

Richard

Richard,
My brother just got a ps3 and I did instruct him to check the manual settings because he couldn't get any sound out of it. Haven't heard from him for a few days, he might have thrown it against the wall
John

Hahaa or got it working and is now ignoring his phone while he chain watches 100 HD movies.

Cheers,

Richard

Latest review of the ARC

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/proce...nd-d2-ssp.html

Great review. Great for Anthem and ARC for sure.

Seems to align with the findings we are seeing here as well... You know, other than him finding out that one of his speaker drivers was down for the count hahaa. Other than that he sounds like he knows what he is doing

Cheers,

Richard

I too wanted to put the mic on the sofa cushions and found the stand too tall. I found that course thread 3/8 all thread (the solid rod with threads running it's entire length) worked as a suitable substitute. The mic holder threaded right onto it and at the base I used 2 fender washers and 2 hex nuts to clamp it to the provided base.
Afterwards I did notice the picture showed the mic stand on the floor in front of the sofa or chair, but I still think the closer you can get the mic to where your ears will be the better.

Yeah. I put the base under and between the cushions but, eventually, transferred the mic to another stand, one that came with a competitor's system.

I cannot believe this is the longest period with no posts to this thread. Two days.
I am very happy with the results of the ARC-1 on my system. I was listening with my wife to an old jazz cd with oscar peterson and every instrument stood out across the stage in front of us. And it was just stereo not 5.1. Also, voices again just appear in front of me separate from the instruments on other cd's like Fleetwood Mac.

Got a 40GB PS3 to familiarize myself with it. When the re-introduced 80GB appears on June 12 I'll get one of those and then return one or the other depending on whether the 80GB unit is as quiet as the 40GB.

Right now the 40GB is sitting out in the open and it is plenty silent for BD playback. It will be going into the cabinet later this weekend. It will be paired with an IR2BT to allow remote control from my Harmony remote.

I'm using a Blue Jeans HDMI cable to connect to the D2.

I have it sending HDMI 1080p/24 to the D2 (with Frame Lock=OFF and HDMI Repeater=NO in the D2) and 6 channel LPCM for audio. The D2 is converting the video to 1360x768p/60 output for my plasma.

The PS3 will also send 720p/60 for games, and 1080i/60 for "video rate" Blu-Ray discs. I don't intend to use it for standard DVD playback.

So far, my optimal settings in the D2 for this PS3 appear to be:

Brightness 50, Contrast 51, Color 51, Tint 48, Exponential Gamma 115

As with the Comcast box, the trick of raising Contrast by 1 and countering by raising Exponential Gamma (in this case only by 1) appears to produce imagery which has significantly less banding in tricky scenes. I found no gotchas during calibration -- either at 1080p or 720p. And the HDMI handshake appears reasonably solid, although the initial handshake to 1080p/24 takes about 6 seconds.

My first impressions are quite positive. The PS3 is silent and very responsive during Blu-Ray playback. The firmware update process works without a hitch. At the moment I'm using it with Sony's optional BD remote control, and that works fine (although it's ridiculous that this remote has no backlighting for the buttons).

I must admit, I continue to be impressed with how well my Pioneer DVD player and the D2 handle standard DVDs, both for video and audio. I can see improvement for reference quality transfers (comparing DVD and Blu-Ray) in the brief amount of Blu-Ray viewing I've done, but it is not night and day. That is, both ways look "right" when you are watching them even though I know I'm seeing more detail in the Blu-Ray version, and can actually quantify it in many scenes. In one sense this is a compliment to the video editors who handled these very high quality standard DVD transfers. Of course to get that quality of SD-DVD playback you have to be really careful with your SD-DVD setup. Whereas it comes almost automatically for Blu-Ray.

ETA: I'll do some A/B comparisons with the SD-DVD and Blu-Ray versions of some high quality releases (e.g., Ratatouille) after my setup stuff settles down a bit. Both my Pioneer and the PS3 appear to display Paused frames cleanly, so this should be straightforward to set up both for still frames and moving sequences.

There is, I think, a bigger difference on the audio side. The surround sound experience, in particular, seems much more natural. Now don't expect you are going to think the actors are there in the room with you. Instead the audio becomes more seamless and "movie like". You will, of course, from time to time be startled by sound effects that sound like they ARE in the room with you. And the dynamics will impress as well.

The bottom line is that even with a 768p display and a 5.1 speaker setup, my first impression is that Blu-Ray is enough of an improvement to be worth it.

Anyway, it is early days yet. I'll probably have some more details later. For those who are convinced I'll regret using the PS3 for Blu-Ray playback: If there are particular things you'd like me to try to help me feel buyer's remorse, now is a good time to bring them up! (grin!)

I love to hate Sony, but I'll need some help this time.
--Bob

Time to spend some Bob Dollars on a Bigger 1080p Display or PJ.

With only 768p - it will be hard to see the difference between
SD [up-converted with the D2] and Blu-Ray.

Oh it's not hard to see the difference. A big factor is getting native resolution into the 768p panel, which of course I can do with the D2.

It's just that my SD DVD setup is so good right now that the imagery just "looks right" when you are viewing it. So you see past imaging details and don't miss the extra resolution while watching.

-------------------------------------

I'm not going to 1080p until I find a 1080p/120Hz panel that I like (maybe next year). And I'm not going to a projector of any kind since life is too short to have to futz with geometry issues. (grin!)
--Bob

I'm not sure what Century you are in but Geometry
does not exist in the 21st Century. This is the
Digital Century.

Bob:

What calibration test are you using to set exponential gamma?

Avia Pro -- the more expensive version of the Avia standard DVD calibration stuff. They have several different "squint chart" tests for basic Gamma and Gamma tracking.
--Bob

What can I say? I like fixed pixel displays where I don't have to worry about keystone adjustment or whether there will ever be any variation in optical path between the three color projection elements over time.

But hey, I've got a Blu-Ray player now. 23 Skidoo!
--Bob

All I can say is on my 13Ft Screen - I have perfect
1080p pixel placement. And my ceiling doesn't shake
enough to change the optical path

This is one case where BIGGER is BETTER

I just rec'd mine about 2 weeks ago. I haven't had the time to update my processor as yet and use the ARC.......hopefully this weekend.

Lets keep this map alive.

http://www.frappr.com/anthemhometheatergear

COOL - I just ADDED ME

Good luck, I ordered my ARC on APRIL 9th, and yesterday my dealer says there is still no word from Anthem on when it will be coming! They were sure quick to charge my credit card though. The dealer thinks Anthem is holding up shipments because of some software bugs, but I told him that there are a LOT of people on this forum with ARC working just fine. I'm going to call or email Anthem and see what is up.

I was told by Nick (Anthem) early May that they ran out of microphones. The were expecting to ship again early June.

Be patient it's worth it!

The more I use the PS3 for Blu-Ray with my D2 the more pleased I am.

The IR2BT remote converter is working just fine with my Harmony 880, although it will likely take me a while to figure out my preferred button mappings. (It's a bit annoying that the PS3 only lets you pair one BD controller at a time so I can't easily compare operation of the optional, Sony BD controller with my current mappings on the Harmony via the IR2BT.) Power ON/OFF of the PS3 via the IR2BT is working without a hitch so far.

By the way, for any other PS3 newbies, the USB wall wart power supply that IR2BT sells to power the IR2BT -- and apparently any other USB wall wart -- can not be used to recharge the game controller that comes with the PS3. Apparently the game controller is looking for some sort of intelligent handshake from the USB port before it will start charging (not merely the presence of power). So you have to use a computer USB jack, a USB hub, or the USB port found on the back of some set top boxes. Right now I'm using the USB port in my Comcast HD-DVR for that. (This is necessary because the PS3's own USB ports are not powered when the PS3 is in off/standby.)

-------------------------------------------------

I made one additional tweak to my D2 calibration: Raised the Exponential Gamma from 115 to 116. I suspect I'll be doing a bit more tweaking as I do more viewing -- and at some point I'm going to have to "do it right" with an optical sensor and creating custom Gamma curves in the Live Video Settings Editor application -- but at the moment I'm quite pleased with the calibration results based on this simpler method, so it'll take a while to overcome inertia and do that.

The extra resolution and increased color gamut of the Blu-Ray recordings is more obvious on some discs than on others. Partly this is due to transfer quality of course, but some content just shows this stuff off better. I was quite impressed with the imaging improvement in all 3 Pirates of the Caribbean movies for example. The SD-DVD versions of these are no slouches, but the Blu-Ray versions just blow them away -- even on my "mere" 768p Fujitsu plama.

-----------------------------------------

For audio, the enhanced dynamics and more enveloping feel of the surround sound experience are readily evident in the lossless Blu-Ray tracks. However the real "wow" factor for me is in musical passages. The clarity, presence, and "realness" of the instrumentation is wonderful indeed! I knew the technology was capable of this of course, but it's great to actually have it confirmed by ear. It's also great that I was able to use the ARC stuff for a few weeks before setting up the Blu-Ray so I can separate these two, significant, audio improvements.

[The down side of focussing too much on such stuff like this is that when you see real events, or hear live performers, your mind starts thinking about how the "audio" and "video" might be adjusted to improve reality.]

I've tried LPCM, TrueHD and DTS-HD MA tracks and the new firmware support in the PS3 seems to be working without a hitch. The HDMI connection at 1080p/24 and 1080p/60 appears solid and the conversion in the D2 from 1080p/24 input to 1360x768p/60 output for my display also appears flawless. I have not yet tried any 1080i Blu-Ray discs.

The next step will be to move the PS3 inside the cabinet and see if the fan cranks up. But judging from the very modest amounts of heat it is putting out when seated on top of the cabinet (at least for Blu-Ray playback), I'm not expecting any problems.
--Bob

With all the calibration tests I've been doing lately, I've gotten in the habit of periodically backing up my Video Source Adjust settings to a PC file with Live Video Settings Editor. I'm currently using the "test" version, V1.30a, of Live Video Settings Editor.

I'm doing this on a Windows 2000 laptop with a real serial port.

Last night I did one of these ("Get" from the D2 and "Save" to a file), and as is my normal practice, I poked around in the results from the Get before doing the Save, and discovered, for I think the first time, that the Get did not read one of the settings properly from the D2. Although it had picked up that Exponential Gamma Correction was selected for my PS3 input, the numeric value it picked up was 1.00 instead of 1.16.

There was no error message indicating any sort of transfer problem, and a second Get returned correct results (I checked all of them) -- which of course is the version I Saved to the PC file.

My point is, apparently there are cases where the Editor will fail to read the data correctly from the D2, but there will be no error indication.

Even when using a real serial port.

Sigh.

So I suggest when doing transfers (either way) with Live Video Settings editor, it would be wise to at least spot check the results to see if everything seems to have transferred correctly.
--Bob

That's good to hear shipments may start again soon, thanks for letting me know. I'm normally a pretty patient man, but reading how well ARC works on this forum has got me pretty fired up to get it and use it. Maybe it won't be long now.

I'm getting some new subs in early July, and ARC would really help setting them up. It will be great to not have to hook up REQ and do sweeps and mess with my BFD again. REQ and BFD were way easier and faster than the individual test tone method, but I expect ARC to be way easier and faster with much better results!