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Review 2 of 2
Price Paid:
$1500.00
from JB-HiFi Australia Summary:
I purchased this unit as part of a general upgrade to my whole system. I was using the component input to my HDTV and wanted to gain the benefits of upscaling my source inputs to take advantage of the HDMI capabilities of my display screen. Foxtel do not provide a high def output so I have upscaled the foxtel signal to 1080i. I also have a large collection of CD's and didn't want to feel that audio quality was to be compromised too much by moving to a receiver rather than the play the CD's through a dedicated amplifier.
First point to note was that although the automatic on board speaker set up system was easy to use I was not particularly pleased with the result. This I believe was due to the fact that my sub woofer is being driven by the LFE channel as well as the high level input. This is the recommended set up that all REL sub woofers should have. But as a result of this the subwoofer is being driven when the the right and left channels were being driven so giving the impression that the bass was extended further than would be the case normally.
A quick fix was to remove the high level connector from the Sub woofer and only led the LFE channel drive the speaker. This gave me a more acceptable result although in the end I manually adjusted the speaker set up to get the sound that I wanted.
Once this had been completed and the receiver had warmed up I was very pleased with the result. Seperation was excellent and the pure audio (minimal sound processing mode) provided a very high quality and smooth audio experience. But it is a compromise, where ths amplifier appears to excel is in it's video capabilities. The image was fantastic with a real improvement in those signals that have a high quality video source. Upscaling occuring with out any visible artifacts. Contrast and colour saturation was excellent.
I have recently purchased the Digital Video essentials DVD to again improve the total system performance and so far things are going well. Improvements as I'm tweaking the various different options are great, and as I'm getting to grips with the tools things can only get better.
In summary I believe that this amplifier has great out of the box performance, and using the receivers internal calibration tools for speaker set up certainly help except with the proviso stated earlier regarding the high level input to the sub woofer. The real benefits really start to come through when you start to tweak the components to create a truely integrated audio visual system.
Strengths:
Ease of use, video performance especially the upscaling capabilities.
Weaknesses:
Assumptions regarding the on board audio setup, but if you understand your system you will understand the limitations of this kind of set up process. Similar Products Used:
Cambridge Audio Azur 540
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