I decided to upgrade my home theater setup a bit recently. It’s been fun!
Until now, I was using five in-ceiling speakers that came with the house and a 4 year old Yamaha Aventage amp for a while (allegedly 110 Watts at 2 channels driven), and I had added a 12” SVS subwoofer a while back. My movie room is pretty small and the overhead speakers were decent but didn’t sound super great on some content, and I didn’t really use it for music. I used it more because it was a good spot for sitting close to the TV and it had a sub.
In the new configuration, things remain in a 5.1 setup, just better. I tried out using the existing ceiling speakers for Atmos while adding new floor speakers, and it was good, but I’m not missing a lot and I figure I didn’t want to water down the good speakers sound with unmatched ok speakers that are mostly upper midrange and treble. Testing Atmos on one of the early Mandalorian episodes (great show!), there’s like a bird that tweets in the ceiling or something once. Without Atmos, that bird is probably going to tweet from another speaker. I’m totally ok with that! What you don’t listen to, you don’t know what you are missing, and that’s fine - I don’t have the outlet power for more amps without adding a circuit (will get to that). I could be very happy with 3.1 but it’s nice to have rear speakers to fill out the room.
The new setup uses Ascend Acoustics speakers - two towers and their giant Horizon center channel, and possibly am going to use two more towers for the rear surrounds (I currently have some smaller surrounds). A Rythmik Audio FV15SE subwoofer replaces a similarly sized SVS sub. (SVS is amazing on the phone and I still like the company and haven’t tried their newer DSP subs).
I didn’t go to the Ascends directly, I was also trying out some Dali Oberon 7’s, which are good, but the paired center was I thought a little underwhelming. The build quality (heavy duty vinyl wrapped exterior) is not nearly as good as the ascends - the Dalis got attached to a Sonos Amp and can be used for music stuff elsewhere. For those that care, the Oberon 7s I found out were made in China despite Dali making higher end versions in Denmark (which is why I originally picked them). Still decent though. One major downside is they are 6 ohms, which stresses amps more than 8 ohm speakers, and the higher end versions seem to want even more power. They aren’t very efficient.
Anyway… what I settled on…. The Ascends are amazingly detailed and just a few days old, and I’m still getting used to them. They all have ribbon tweeters and the cabinets are built out of laminated bamboo vs MDF (nice!), and the company is awesome to talk to. Tracks with strong vocals are instantly better, midrange is so good, and it’s easier to notice lots of cool textures, fingers hitting guitar strings, and stuff like that. Some recordings are revealed a bit to the point where you’re like “were those castanets really necessary?”, so I suspect it’s actually going to change what kind of music I like to listen to, which is an impressive feat. Songs I thought I knew from headphone and car sound like different worlds. I’ve gotten to the point from my computer music hobby where I can’t help but kind of critique mixing choices on albums (particularly stereo), and yeah, I’m doing that more now because I can hear it more. It’s also giving me some ideas of things to try in my tracks that I couldn’t even hear were there before. (It’s kind of a shame what music is popular is probably driven by what sounds good on cell phones and laptops, right?)
The Rythmik subwoofer (FV15SE) is stellar. Their “direct-servo” technology apparently corrects for things the subwoofer isn’t supposed to do basically immediately, which makes a drum sound like a drum, rather than the usual boomy-subwoofer sound that often just sounds like an (I guess) sine wave. It’s punchy and consistent and can definitely produce some continuous extremely low vibrations. I could have added a larger woofer or gotten a second, but I think it’s enough. If you start to over-emphasize bass too much, that’s all you can pay attention to. I honestly don’t care about movie theater explosion bass so much, so that’s why I got a sealed sub. It’s more of a low-end extension to the speakers. Comparing the Audyssey curves from the SVS and the new sub, it’s night and day. The new sub is pretty much flat in frequency, and the old sub had a definite fall off in the response (it just didn’t get nearly as low). I’m not sure who else does this, but the price is good. I read where dual subs are trendy for making a good sound field of bass, and I’m kind of thinking about it, but I’d have to turn them down in volume, as I don’t really want double the output.
I greatly appreciate the work ethic, attention to detail, and fair price out of both of these companies - also being really user centric. I wrote software, but I feel that’s the hardware version of how I liked to (or wanted to) work. No corners cut.
The attached electronics have also been changed around.
The old audio-video receiver could only output max wattage on two channels, so I’ve switched to a Rotel-RMB 1555 amplifier (125 Watts per channel across 5 channels) in order to better power everything. The Yamaha did not allow switching off the amplifier portion, so partly to reclaim capacity on the house circuit (shaving off 150 watts?) and partly to get a better room correction system, the Rotel is now being fed by a Marantz 8805A. I bought the Marantz as it had most all the features I could want, and I thought it might be less buggy than some of the less well known brands. Yamaha had been rock solid but no longer made anything that wasn’t an integrated amp, and I wondered just a bit if it was a bit thin sounding at times as it might have struggled to push out voltage. (I may have been imagining).
I’m just using the RCA outputs of the Marantz. It supports XLR connections to an amp but they are apparently not really balanced. They might sound a tiny bit different but my amp doesn’t have XLR connections. Balanced cables aren’t meaningful for 3 foot cable runs anyway, and there’s no noise to speak of.
From testing, I think external amps do make a big difference though - maybe not between amps, but having one that can output claimed wattage on all channels vs an integrated one that can’t. I had another set of speakers I was trying out earlier, and they cleared up a TON after switching form the old Yamaha to the Yamaha powering the Rotel (I didn’t have the Marantz yet) - especially in the midrange and bass territory. I suspect the Yamaha was more underpowered than the advertising indicated, but I can’t be sure. It seemed to be distorting though.
Audyssey room correction on the Marantz has a lot to tweak that can affect things, but I’m currently running it with Dynamic EQ on, Dynamic Volume off, and changed the curve to “Flat” in settings. All speakers are set to a 80 Hz crossover with the sub, allegedly 80-100Hz is the point where you start to localize sounds, so there’s no penalty to letting the sub get all the lows. If anyone buys a Marantz, I would suggest buying the Audyssey phone app ($20), which the on-screen setup process doesn’t mention. You get more controls and can take more microphone measurements. The graphs it produces about the corrections it says it makes are INSANELY good, showing a speaker in a room having lots of frequency dips and spikes and then going to basically 100% flat. (The Ascends are nicely flat anyway, it’s the room that makes the dips and spikes). The only thing I don’t like about the phone app is it’s really fiddly if you wanted to adjust the EQ, but I don’t really want to be adjusting the EQ and unflattening the speakers anyway. Why would you want to? If I want more or less bass, I could just tweak the trim on the sub. I’m a little curious what other systems are like, but the way Dirac seems to require a laptop seems like a pain, and I’m not sure I could hear a difference. I’m kind of the opinion at the moment that differences in processors can’t really be perceived.
I don’t believe in magical cables, but B&H had some very nice Canare Star Quads with well-made locking banana plug connectors and braided housings that are nicer than what I could do myself. Allegedly they are effectively 11 gauge and look really nice - price was quite decent and they will hold up.
Cooling was one thing I didn’t expect to worry about, the Yamaha ran pretty cool before, the new stuff, well, it turns out the Marantz runs kind of hot. I think it’s the video chip as opposed to the preamps, but it also has these discrete preamps (unnecessary, IMHO?) that probably run hot as well. I have a short 19” Sanus rack which is open on three sides. Early experimentation with AC Infinity rack fans (“cloudplate”) was ok, but I find their USB fans work even better, so I’m going to hook them up to a thermostat controller so they come on automatically and don’t stay running overnight. They are pretty darn quiet and can live on top of the components behind a vented rack panel. Strangely AC Infinity seems to also be in the medicinal “plant” growing business — they don’t seem to have any real competition.
I’ve also added a few ATS Acoustics panels to maybe help with some reflections on the back walls. I think they do. They look cool if they don’t. I had previously bought some panels from GIK and I think these are a little nicer on the front, like they didn’t rush.
That all kind of sounds like a lot, but it came out a lot cheaper, I think, the Definitive Technology setup I used to have some 15 years ago (active speakers/woofers). And all those subwoofers kind of died an early death from some sort of component failure that was really annoying. Also sounds a lot better.
Anyway, check out Ascend and Rythmik Audio if you are looking at speakers and subs, perhaps. They are both outstanding. It seems weird to buy speakers you can’t hear maybe, but around here most of the reasonable audio stores are gone, and the one that is left was rude to me like 20 years ago and treated me like I was a kid who needed to go elsewhere (so, yeah, they lost some business). If you get 2x more speaker by not paying the store itself, that’s huge. So yeah, go internet!
If you want other things (amps, Sonos speakers, etc), I also remain a big fan of Crutchfield, their customer service and return policy is amazingly good and they ship FAST, particularly on the east coast. They may not stock everybody’s higher end models of everything, but they have a lot of inventory. If you want pre-made cables, the Canare stuff at B&H is awesome, and it’s a good place for ethernet and HDMI cables as well.