Hi everyone, I just came back from spending a weekend at Scott’s awsome place in Austin.
It was great to see him and his lovely wife again. We used to hang when they lived in Atlanta and I turned him on to the wonders of ESL’s
Scott had just received his new side speakers, so we installed them (Mirage Omni’s) and tweaked all the settings in the source gear and the preamp. We also did a full Audyssey 8 point measurement and correction run.
First, Scott’s room looks pretty cool, especially those nice Summits at the front look ‘maavelous’ (in a Billy Crystal voice).
It’s amazing how many silly setting one has to go through on all the various pieces of gear to get optimal performance. Heck, the biggest fun was figuring out that the Oppo universal player must be set to 1080i output, or it won’t pass decoded SACD multi-channel (only get stereo at 480p) over HDMI.
Likewise for getting bitstream audio from a Sony BluRay, one must turn off the menu overlay sounds to get it to fully bitstream. Etc. Etc.
After running the Audyssey correction, and turning on DynamicEQ, we listened to discs and movies, and boy, was it night and day difference. Bass was tight, the center channel blended perfectly, and as Scott noted, the soundstage was seamless. One can’t hear individual speakers, just a big soundfield.
The new preamp is pretty slick and does a lot of great processing out of the box.
As we worked on all this, I did provide some further acoustic treatment recommendations I hope Scott has time to get around to, as it would really turn a great room into a killer room.
Anyway, it’s now one of Austin’s better home theaters. Congrats Scott!
