Quote:
Originally Posted by
DenonLover 
Did you get the MRX 300, 500 or 700? I was wondering how these units would compare. How do you like ARC so far in your room?
The only material differences between them are streaming and HD radio features. As I never used HD Radio on my 4308, and have an AppleTV, I went with the 300.
ARC works better for me in the midrange, because it doesn't have that infernal "crappy speakers compensation" 2kHz notch that Audyssey imposes. (People with 7" 2-ways with flush-mounted tweeters as their main speakers may prefer Audyssey, because the notch provides a band-aid for the directivity problems of such incompetently-designed speakers.) Down low, they're about the same. I had to manually fix both of them in the crossover region, after measurements. I don't know why room correction systems don't ping the mains and subs together, because all of them
always bungle the crossover. My mains already have declining sound power with frequency (i.e. similar to the Audyssey target curve), so Audyssey never had to do much up top. People with brighter-voiced mains may appreciate the full-band correction of Audyssey and the ability to tailor the highs better with the "Audyssey" and "flat" curves. (ARC "only" goes up to 5kHz.)
Also, Dolby Volume's "modeler" component seems on par with Audyssey's DynamicEQ. I mention that because IMO DynamicEQ is by far the most useful part of the Audyssey suite.
As an aside, it's much trickier to take measurements of the MRX than it was of the Denon, because it doesn't have an analog multichannel input. I thought that was useless...until I realized I needed to figure out a way to get test tones to my desired groupings of speakers! (For example, for mains-sub integration, one should run sweeps through the LCR and multisub system simultaneously.)
