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Anthem AVM60 Review (AV Processor)

Doodski

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Blue looks good. Old 70ies Marantz are popular. I wish I didnt throw one out for sucking when prices were low. I could have sold it for 500dollars plus today :D
I did a similar thing to a Marantz receiver in the 1990's that had some very nice amp modules inside. I butchered the receiver and made a power amp out of the amp modules because I felt like doing a DIY MOD project. That same receiver sells today for about $500-700 in Canada. :facepalm:
 

milosz

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These AVR's don't have to be so janky. They could do it right if they wanted to, and I don't think it would even cost them any more- except maybe they'd have to fire a couple of marketing guys and hire an engineer.
 

Guerilla

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Ha ha. @Doodski I turned mine into a poweramp and used it for a little while before it went to the recycle station
 

Robbo99999

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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:

View attachment 110978

Menus were low resolution but speedy which I appreciated.

Back panel shows balanced outputs which is what I used exclusively for my testing:
View attachment 110979

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):
View attachment 110981

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:

View attachment 110982

Dynamic range is a letdown as well:

View attachment 110983

Output drive is very good though:
View attachment 110984

Intermodulation distortion versus level shows very high residual noise:
View attachment 110985

Linearity shows that there is no ability to output 24 bits and that some kind of truncation to 16 bit is occurring:
View attachment 110986

Distortion versus frequency also showed high levels of unwanted signals:
View attachment 110987

A wideband FFT shows all the spurious tones causing the above:
View attachment 110988

Jitter was really bad:

View attachment 110989

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:

View attachment 110990

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:
View attachment 110995

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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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
I certainly don't like that their statements are blatently untrue, that's worse than the pretty poor measurements! 32bit & Hi-Res sound indeed!
 

Bear123

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ASR members: Gee, most of the AVR's tested perform really bad, even all the expensive ones with high end audiophile reputation. It's happening over and over and over again. They just aren't good. I think I'll go spend $3-$4,000 on one, just in case.

????
 

respice finem

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...No manufacturer seems to care...
They would, if more (mass-market) customers were aware enough to care. That's why it's so important to bring these "sins" to light. Frankly, if I knew this a few years ago, I would have probably kept my stereo-only setup. Some people even revert back from surround to stereo.
 
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Krobar

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Happy Sunday everyone, in 2018, I bought this model convinced of its goodness after reading its test carried out by a well-known online newspaper !! As soon as I connected to my system (it replaced a very quiet McIntosh MX119), in XLR only mode, I realized that from the tweeters of my B&W 802D2, in the absence of a music signal, a noise could be heard (2.5 meters away) strange, like the audio of a digital communication !! In short, after long phone calls with the dealer and a month of wasted time, I get a second copy that is used and with cosmetic defects, but which continues to have the defect complained of in the first AVR, so after dozens of phone calls and losing the 10% of the initial value I get a refund of the expense made. ANTHEM .... never see us again !! Now for the HT part I have a MARANTZ AV8805, very quiet (as it normally should be) and of which I am very happy. I am attaching an image of how the plant was in 2018.View attachment 111012

Which prepro you have in your setup now?
 

respice finem

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ASR members: Gee, most of the AVR's tested perform really bad, even all the expensive ones with high end audiophile reputation. It's happening over and over and over again. They just aren't good. I think I'll go spend $3-$4,000 on one, just in case.

????
Some live from their "reputation" for far too long, for what they do. I'll keep my humble little AVR as long as it will work, and then seriously consider selling the whole speaker "zoo" and buy a pair of decent near- to midfield monitors, going back to stereo. Minimalism FTW. It seems, for surround sound we may have usable headphone-based alternatives soon, that can't really be much worse than this.
 
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iLoveCats

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Anthem guys in the online forums and Facebook groups are going to be furiously crafting excuses for this. The Anthem users are excessively aloof about their gear, typically posting a one word response, "Anthem", to everything.
 

Koeitje

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Some live from their "reputation" for far too long, for what they do. I'll keep my humble little AVR as long as it will work, and then seriously consider selling the whole speaker "zoo" and buy a pair of decent near- to midfield monitors, going back to stereo. Minimalism FTW. It seems, for surround sound we may have usable headphone-based alternatives soon, that can't really be much worse than this.
I think it's mostly because a lot of these brands existed before AVR's were a thing. They aren't software companies and still don't have the knowledge to make these complex systems work properly.
 

respice finem

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Maybe for 300$ that's a good enough excuse, but not for 10 times as much. The HDMI/HDCP licensing cost and technological challenges have indeed scared off (if not killed off) many smaller manufacturers. That said, HDMI is around for many years already. In case of smaller ones like Anthem I would be ready to believe there may be "technology issues", but the "alpha animals" of the market are sometimes little better. My thinking is rather in the direction "why should we care, as long as we get the stuff sold"? Then, there is the so called "curse of good enough". Example: I wanted to have surround sound a few years back. So I bought an AVR, and in my mediocre room with middle class speakers, it sounds OK, at least without direct comparison with something really better.
 
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Bear123

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Anthem guys in the online forums and Facebook groups are going to be furiously crafting excuses for this. The Anthem users are excessively aloof about their gear, typically posting a one word response, "Anthem", to everything.
It's really difficult for folks when facts disagree with their long held and very strong subjective beliefs.
 

Matias

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I’m starting to think of AVR’s as COVID. Most countries and governments aren’t actually working in an efficient manner to solve the problem, every move they make is so driven by populism and demagoguery, and nobody seems to really care.

AVR’s from all price tags produce way inferior performance than budget stand alone DAC’s, some are even broken like this unit. No manufacturer seems to care. There is even a guy called Amir bringing out their dirty laundry takind the time to measure their crappy gear. No manufacturer seems to care...
That is why we need a new manufacturer to enter this market with properly designed products. Then it will start stealing their sales, and only then the former manufacturers will pay attention, when it hits their pockets.
 

Tks

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We all know by now, the typical (not really typical considering these things cost quite a bit) AVR's are plagued with just straight up, garbage objective performance.

What I've noticed also, is usually also following it, is completely garbage software implementation. Where you have no idea why something isn't working when it isn't. Quite a few reviews always have something either broken, or not working as one would expect. After a factory reset no less.
 

peng

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First of all, thank you very much for giving us something interesting to read on a Sunday morning.

And sorry to bug you again on this, please please fix the SINAD for the AV7705 that should be about 75 dB if I remember right. The 92 dB this chart shows was for the when the output was reduced to about 2.4V balanced/XLR. Again, at the standard 4 V balanced output, it was about 75 dB. I think you did say you had fixed it when I first asked but for some reason the error has remained. With this enlarged chart, the error has become easy to spot.:D Thanks again.
 
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