I tried this and gave up. setting aside the obvious extra cabling issues, which can be more of an eyesore than you may expect, The latest app only works with pairs so you won't be able to configure 1 speaker. You can roll back to older firmware, and you don't lose any features so not a huge loss
Agreed. We're working on making it possible to put more than two speakers in a "room".
Enabling phase linearity adds about 32ms latency. Combined with the distance to MLP, my AVR didn't cope well with the video delay. Audyssey only allows a 20ms delta in time alignment. So, wth my 8C's at 16ft the time of flight correction was nearly 50ms and the rest of the speakers had to be set at 30ms ToF correction even if they were only 6ft away with almost no discernable latency (neumann 120). Maybe Dirac is better in this regard?
The linear-phase mode does indeed add about 32 ms of latency. Unfortunately, there's nothing we or anybody else could do about that, except perhaps for reducing the crossover filter order from 4th order to a lower order. This would however hurt the overall performance. If you need less latency, please turn off linear-phase mode. The audible difference is actually quite subtle.
Something you should take into account though, is that if the other speakers in the system have a different phase-response, you won't be able to integrate all speakers perfectly in the sweetspot.
I'm afraid I'm not sure what feature in Dirac you're referring to.
No sleep mode and power on takes about 90 seconds. Doesn't bother me but some may not like it
There is a sleep mode. You can enable it by clicking and holding the "volume circle". Tap it to enable an disable mute, hold for 2 seconds to enable sleep mode.
Finally, and this is a "me problem", having mismatched surrounds/heights distracts me. Even with something as neutral as Neumann, I felt like something sounds off when listening to upmixed content.
my main use case is Auro3D, which IMO emphasizes speaker tonality mismatches because it's playing a modified L/R channel simultaneously with the front LCR (as opposed to discrete content which is usually not a direct copy of front L/R content). Or, maybe it's just sighted bias
Ideally, all speakers have the same frequency response, phase-response and directivity. In practice that usually means you want the same speakers throughout. However, if a manufacturer could make different models have very close frequency reponse, phase response and directivity, you could still get great results with different speaker models.
We are in fact working on several new models right now. The first one to be released is a bigger one. Much bigger! After that we'll release one or two smaller speakers. All speakers will have a linear-phase mode. Linear-phase can sound a tad better than non-linear phase, but an equally important reason is that it's simply easier to integrate multiple different speakers in a multiple-speaker setup if they have more or less the same phase response.
All that said, it sounded amazing and is my favorite stereo speaker hands down. Cost no object I would buy an all 8C setup, but cost is definitely an object. FWIW I've tried just about well regarded speaker on this site, and my subjective opinion is basically in line with Erin's Top 5 list (except Kef Reference Meta, never tried because I'd rather get 8351B for that $)
hopefully someday a smaller version and/or horizontal center will be introduced. With my limited time I'm in the process of switching to Genelec Ones for multichannel, selling a pair of 8Cs (i bought 2 pairs) and moving the other pair to my home office so I can be ready when uBacch is finally released.
I'm glad that despite your mostly valid criticisms, you still love your 8c's!
BACCH is coming...
