This is a review and detailed measurements of the Anthem AVM60 Home Theater Audio/Video Processor (AVP) with balanced output. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $3,000.
The design is typical of Anthem:
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Menus were low resolution but speedy which I appreciated.
Back panel shows balanced outputs which is what I used exclusively for my testing:
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For testing, I reset the unit to factory. I usually test HDMI and Toslink/Coax. Here, no matter what I did, I could not get the unit to output anything when using either Toslink or Coax. It would recognize those inputs and tell me it was receiving PCM signal but the output was basically noise. Don't know if this is a bug or a defect in this sample.
Anthem AVM60 Measurements
As usual we start with feeding the unit over HDMI and measure what comes out of front left and right when adjusted for 4 volts (for balanced outputs):
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Well, this is not very good. We can't even clear the 16 bit mark which would require SINAD to be at least 96 dB. There are a lot of distortion and spurious tones. As such ranking is even worse than one of the previous Anthem AVRs we have tested, the
MRX1120:
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Dynamic range is a letdown as well:
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Output drive is very good though:
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Intermodulation distortion versus level shows very high residual noise:
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Linearity shows that there is no ability to output 24 bits and that some kind of truncation to 16 bit is occurring:
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Distortion versus frequency also showed high levels of unwanted signals:
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A wideband FFT shows all the spurious tones causing the above:
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Jitter was really bad:
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At this point I thought maybe my system is truncating bits to 16 bits for it gets to AVM60 which can happen with HDMI output but without other inputs working, I could not verify if this was occurring. As I was playing with the unit, the real source of problems popped out. I had the input selected as HDMI but no audio signal being output. This was the FFT spectrum:
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Notice how there is a 1 kHz tone generated internally together its harmonic entourage! With this as the baseline, no wonder all of our tests show poor performance. There is some interference to the tune of 1 kHz (e.g. some CPU timer) creating noise that is bleeding into the output of the DAC.
Conclusions
Based on above measurements, we have one broken AV Processor. Performance across the board struggles to clear 15 bits yet we have this marketing information from the company:
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We don't have anything like that here. Assuming that "A/D" is meant to be "D/A," the 106 dB must be some DAC chip spec, not actual system.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Anthem AVP60 Processor.
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