When it comes to AV Receivers, I've gotta tell you, they just don't sound very different from one another. Speakers can make a very large difference. Your room can make an equally large difference. AV Receivers make a much smaller difference. Amplifiers make hardly any difference at all.
But proper bass management and equalization, those can make substantial differences. Being able to position speakers overhead or in the Front Wide positions, those things make very obvious differences. Being able to adjust and control the signal with DSP, that can make a very large difference. So in my opinion, AV Receivers are not about "purity", they're about features. We could strip down two cars - no seats, no sound system, no trim or trappings. In these conditions, Car A is able to go 10 mph faster than Car B. But now Car A remains in this completely stripped down state while Car B gets lovely leather seats, a rockin' sound system, and all the bells and whistles. Which one would you actually rather drive on a day to day basis? Furthermore, what if that 10 mph difference never even existed at all? What if, in their stripped down states, both of them could go equally fast and handled and cornered equally well. But now Car B gets all the luxury features while Car A remains completely stripped down. Oh, and Car B - with all of its luxury features and completely equal performance - is actually less expensive than stripped down, not a single advantage Car A? You still want Car A? What if a reviewer told you that Car A is better because it was made by BMW while Car B was made by Toyota?
So this is the issue. To start, if you stripped all of the features out of the Marantz or the Yamaha and compared them blind to the Cambridge - or a Denon or an Onkyo or whatever, all of them with all of their features stripped out - right off the bat, they'd barely sound any different at all. You might literally not be able to tell them apart what-so-ever. That's the starting point, now we layer features on top of that baseline. So ultimately, it's the feature set that matters, because the base line performance of all of these AV Receivers is either identical sounding, or so close that the feature set easily outweighs any tiny differences in base line sound.
There's no such thing as "pure" sound reproduction. Once those sound waves leave the front of the speaker, the room takes over. And ignoring the effects of the room in the name of "purity" is just folly. If your speaker - all by itself, always created a little hump in the frequency response right around, let's say, 500 Hz, we wouldn't think twice about using some EQ to bring that little hump back into linearity. The speaker is misbehaving a little bit, and we easily correct it with some EQ. No big deal, right? So why is it that when the room creates that same little hump around, let's still call it, 500 Hz, all of a sudden, if we correct that little hump, we've somehow "ruined" the "purity" of the sound? Does it really matter whether the hump in the frequency response was caused by the speaker or the room? Or does it only matter that a small hump in the frequency response was created? And if we can easily compensate for that little bit of misbehaviour - regardless of the cause - why would we not do so? That's pretty basic logic. But in audiophile land, they'll blame that hump that was created by the room on the speakers, or on the amplifiers, or on the pre-amp. It's a nonsensical way of looking at the problem, but they're so stuck in this notion of "purity" that nonsense is the only way to continue holding onto those beliefs while acknowledging the plainly audible results.
Bottom line is this: you start by getting speakers that don't misbehave - you've already done that by getting some Ascend Sierra RAAL speakers! Now you try to make that passive acoustics of your room not misbehave. We really haven't gotten into that yet, but it's a simple idea with an often difficult execution. Very simply, a "non-misbehaving" room will not "ring" and will not "echo". It won't be a full on anechoic chamber - there will be sound wave reflections. But what we're looking for are even and uniform decay times across all of the audible frequencies. That's a simple idea with an often very difficult execution. But regardless of how close we get to that goal, your speakers won't be the things misbehaving, and any electronics driving those speakers are all going to have to contend with the same room acoustics.
So now we come to the deep bass in your room. This is almost a completely separate entity. The deep bass sound waves are going to be physically longer than at least one or two of the dimensions of your room. 20Hz bass sound waves are over 55 feet long. I don't know too many houses with 55 foot tall ceilings. So that means you are GOING to have standing waves. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You are also never going to hear those deep bass sound waves as direct sound; you are only ever going to hear them as reflected sound. The sound waves are physically so long that they will have left the speaker, gone past your ears, reflected off of one or more walls - sometimes multiple times - before ever actually completing one full cycle at your eardrum. Again, you're not sitting 55 feet away from any of your speakers, and your head is not 13.75 feet wide (which is how far apart your ears would need to be in order for you to triangulate the origin of a 20Hz sound wave in air).
So deep bass is a fluid dynamics problem. And Harman has largely solved it. If you truly only care about ONE listening position, then you can find ONE spot in your room as the origin of deep bass sound waves where the source and the listening position will have a reciprocal relationship - the ONE seat is not situated in any full peaks or cancellation nulls when the bass is originating from that ONE location in the room.
But if you care about more than ONE seat, you are going to need more than one source of deep bass sound waves. And those multiple sources of deep bass sound waves must work together with each other AND the room. You can't just stick both deep bass sound sources up and the front of your room and expect good results. So this is where the whole notion of "Full Range" front speakers completely falls apart. The source of deep bass sound waves never acts independently of the room.
So if what we want is uniform bass response across all of our seats - where no seat is situated in a full peak or null - we need to solve the fluid dynamics problem of the standing waves that are created by any single deep bass sound source within a room where at least one of the dimensions is shorter than the longest wavelength being generated. And the way we do this is by having at least two deep bass sound sources situated across the room from one another. This creates a scenario where, instead of the sound wave that would create a standing wave reflecting off the wall and bouncing back into the room where it perfectly "doubles up" or "cancels out" itself, the second source of deep bass cancels out that particular frequency right at the wall - like a "perfect" bass trap. It's a form of active standing wave cancellation.
So in a rectangular room, the ideal would be to have one subwoofer at the mid-point of all four walls. Having one subwoofer in each corner also works very well. Having two subwoofers across the room from one another delivers a good portion of these benefits while being less expensive and easier in terms of allocating floor space. But the goal is this "active standing wave" cancellation. And you can only do that if you have at least two sources of bass acting in concert with each other AND the room. Full Range speakers might give you at least two sources of deep bass, but they are not positioned correctly within the room to achieve this controlled sound wave interaction. The speakers must be positioned where they will create proper imaging in the mid-range and treble frequencies.
So the solution is pretty simple - allow subwoofers to handle the deep bass, and use bass management to prevent the speakers from producing deep bass frequencies where these interactions with the room dictate the sound you ultimately hear, not the speakers themselves. And once the bass is uniform, you can EQ it very effectively because any changes made to the frequency response will act across all seats evenly. This allows for "every seat to be a good seat". And it also means that you can achieve linear frequency response.
But none of that is possible if you're holding onto this idea of "pure" sound reproduction where nothing is done to the signal and the speakers all play Full Range. Again, that way of thinking doesn't take into account the effects of the room, which are enormous!
So this idea of having a DSD stream come off of an SACD and be converted directly into analogue. Such a process would not allow for any of this very important signal manipulation. We want to bass manage ALL recordings going through the system. We want to be able to EQ the deep bass because "uniform" bass response is not the same as "linear" bass response. "Uniform" just means uniform. There will still be some humps and dips. But because it is uniform, we can fix those with some simple EQ, and it will apply to all seats.
It would also be very, very nice to be able to compensate for the non-linearity of human hearing, wouldn't it? I'm talking about how we hear frequency response differently depending on the sound pressure level. If we play any audible frequency (from about 20Hz up to about 20,000 Hz) at 85dB SPL, we will tend to perceive any and all of those frequencies as being equally loud. 85dB SPL is where our human hearing is at its most linear. But 85dB is pretty darn loud! 85dB average with 105dB peaks is defined as full Reference Volume - for this very reason of human hearing being most linear in our perception at 85dB. But that's an IMAX or THX Certified movie theater. Many, many people find those playback levels too loud - especially at home.
So what happens when we listen at quieter playback volumes? Our hearing remains most sensitive in the mid-range. This is the range of the human voice from about 200Hz up to about 4000Hz, with the real "butter zone" being in the 500Hz to 2000Hz range. Sounds can get very quiet at these frequencies and we will still hear them quite well.
But we suck at hearing bass. If a sound is lower in frequency than about 120Hz and quieter in volume than about 65dB SPL, we might not hear it at all! 65dB in the mid-range is completely audible and easy to hear. But 65dB at 60Hz is almost inaudible to us.
So on the front of our AV Receivers is a lovely little read out of the volume. And if that readout is set to display "relative volume", you'll notice that the range of that readout is almost all negative numbers. So I called it "relative volume"; relative to what? It is relative to Reference Volume. 0dB on that volume readout should correspond to full Reference Volume - 85dB average with 105dB peaks. And that is what we are setting when we adjust the individual speaker levels or speaker "trim" levels - either during auto-setup with a microphone, or manually while test tones are played from the AV Receiver and we read the volume levels of those test tones with an SPL meter.
So most people will find 0dB on the volume dial too loud at home. Most people tend to set their volume dials at -10dB or -20dB. Maybe even -30dB. And those negative numbers are telling you how many dB below Reference Volume you're currently hearing.
So what happens if you listen at -20dB relative to full Reference Volume? Now everything is playing at 65dB average with 85dB peaks. Remember what happens at around 65dB to the deep bass due to our non-linear human hearing?
Audyssey has a feature called "Dynamic EQ". It is there specifically to address this non-linearity of human hearing. When you turn down the volume dial, Dynamic EQ adjusts the output of the deep bass and very high frequencies - as well as sounds in the Surround and Surround Back channels where our positional hearing is not the same as sound coming from in front of us - so that everything is still perceived as linear and audible. Those deep bass frequencies that might literally become inaudible at 65dB are kept audible to our ears by making them louder. Not so much that they overpower the mid-range frequencies, but just enough that they SEEM to be equally loud to our ears.
The Yamaha A3040 also has Yamaha's own version of this called YPAO Volume.
So now we're accounting for non-linearity in the speakers, non-linearity in the room, standing waves in the deep bass, non-linearity in the deep bass, and non-linearity in our human hearing! Those are a whole lot of sources of deviation away from the original signal that have nothing to do with passing along a "pure" signal! If we were to pass along a "pure" signal, it would end up all distorted and non-linear by the time it reaches our brain! So that's why this whole notion of keeping the signal "pure" doesn't really make any sense. We are compensating for all of these sources of distortion - the speakers, the room, the nature of deep bass standing waves, human hearing, etc. - none of which are the fault of the original signal!
So...what matters in the selection of an AV Receiver? Is it the ability to keep the signal "pure" so that it can be subjected to all these sources of distortion? Or is it the inclusion of many features to compensate for all of these sources of distortion? My vote is for the latter. And right now, no one is offering more of these features at affordable prices than Denon, Marantz, and Yamaha.
So forget the "purity" or baseline amplification performance. Those things are a very level playing field - if not completely inaudible. Where the current Denon, Marantz, and Yamaha models pull away are in all of these features that allow you to compensate for the many, many sources of potential distortion in your playback system . And I'm not a Denon, Marantz, Yamaha shill. Just a couple of years ago, I was recommending Onkyo and Integra more highly because at that time, they were offering the most features at the lowest price points. There was a time when Sherwood Newcastle was my go-to choice. And a year or two from now, it might be some different brand. It just so happens that right now, it's Denon, Marantz, and Yamaha. So that's where my recommendation is coming from.
This whole thread started with you saying you just ordered some excellent new speakers, and now you want a great AV Receiver to power them that will last a long time and be worth the money you'll be spending. You provided a list of options, and from that list, I'm simply saying the top choices right now are the Denon AVR-X5200W, Marantz SR7009, and Yamaha RX-A3040. I went on to warn you that NONE of them have HDCP 2.2 copy protection, and NONE of them have yet been confirmed as getting DTS:X upgrades. The higher end Denon AVR-X7200W WILL be - for certain - getting an HDCP 2.2 hardware upgrade. And all signs indicate that the X7200W will also be getting DTS:X as an upgrade - but that still isn't 100% certain.
The A3040 does not offer the option of using Front Wide speakers. The AVR-X5200W does not have 7.1 analogue audio inputs. As a result, the Marantz SR7009 and Denon AVR-X7200X have the most features.
So that's how we got to where we are now in this thread. It's gone way off into related tangents, but it all comes back to the same recommendation: if you really, really want HDCP 2.2 and DTS:X, WAIT! In a month's time, we will have confirmation of which (if any) current AV Receiver models will be getting those upgrades. And there will be a whole bunch of new models released in the summer and fall of 2015 that will have those particular features. If you don't care so much about HDCP 2.2 and DTS:X, then the Marantz SR7009 has the most features for its price category. And the Yamaha RX-A3040 and Denon AVR-X5200W come very, very close. HDCP 2.2 requiring a hardware upgrade means that I rather highly doubt that any models other than the high priced Denon AVR-X7200W and Marantz AV8802 Pre-pro will be getting HDCP 2.2 as an upgrade. But DTS:X might be possible as a firmware download. We have to wait and see, but if any brand is going to be capable of adding DTS:X as an upgrade, it's going to be Denon and Marantz. They're already the only brands in this price category offering Auro-3D Immersive Audio. So if anyone's going to add DTS:X support to existing models, it's going to be them. That just puts the Marantz SR7009 even further ahead, in my book. So to me, that's the front runner, with waiting for the 2015 models also being a really good option
- Rob H.