- Joined
- Jan 23, 2020
- Messages
- 4,336
- Likes
- 6,705
the thing that made me pass on the AVRs (e.g Denon X3700) is that IMO this unit is tailored to effectively manage 9 channels audio and process many different codecs, pass through the video, room correction, Bluetooth and wifi, amplification, and many other features. But what I mainly need is only a good quality stereo amp with room correction. The room correction part is there but I doubted the good stereo amp. It is like an overall overkill yet underperformer. I may be totally wrong about other separate system with the perception of they would do better in just stereo (they could be as bad or as good as poor AVR) but it is hard to compare.
I guess my view is that the X3700 is a "good stereo amp" . We have measurements showing that it's almost certainly perfect to beyond the limits of human hearing. That means there is really nothing to be gained - sound quality wise - by getting a separate amp. You'll read and see a lot of subjective amp impressions on the internet and on Youtube, but it's my opinion that those are mostly based on placebo and expectation bias. Under controlled(blind) conditions, people don't seem to be able to tell well measuring amps apart very well within their volume limits.
On the other hand, Room EQ does offer real sound quality improvements that would hold under blind conditions.
From a pure stereo sound quality standpoint, the Denon + Audyssey will almost certainly sound better than the separates + SVS manual EQ. That said, if you have a device in the chain that can apply a convolution file for EQ, then you can do without Audyssey. With the right settings, REW can generate a pretty good EQ file, and the alignment tool in REW can handle phase aligning the L/R with the Subs.