Lyngdorf MP-40 2.1 AV Processor Review

[Andysu]

lack of support for 8 channel input , avoid it ! waste of time ! manufactures are slowly doing away with 8 channel input and brainwashing the public into think atmos is best ever , no 8 channel input

also lack of Lc Rc channels , waste of time , can it do proper Dolby Stereo 04 format ? for laserdiscs , no just dsu , if had 8 channel inputs a cheap Dolby SDU4 could be attached to it

 

[Mr. Widget]

lack of support for 8 channel input , avoid it ! waste of time ! manufactures are slowly doing away with 8 channel input and brainwashing the public into think atmos is best ever , no 8 channel input

also lack of Lc Rc channels , waste of time , can it do proper Dolby Stereo 04 format ? for laserdiscs , no just dsu , if had 8 channel inputs a cheap Dolby SDU4 could be attached to it

Good news.
For you and the small cadre of fellow travelers, the MP-60 offers optional input cards that will satisfy your needs, but for most of us our input requirements are handled by using HDMI inputs.

 

[Lambda]

But you are missing the point entirely.

Your missing my point.
Why Add an analog port to an AV device?
Why have mediocre performance at best if you could go fully digital.

 

[Endibol]

That’s exactly what you are paying for. Conceptually, the idea of measuring speakers and then the room, helps in the way that Magic Beans does. What is different about RoomPerfect is that when doing the multi position testing, it is trying to understand the room, not just averaging the responses.

This problem is similar to how Meyer Sound thinks about bass, saying that nodes aren’t randomly distributed. Certain frequencies are more likely to have peaks and nulls because many homes are built to a certain spacing for wood studs, etc.

The Trinnov Altitude 16/32 has less features than an entry level Denon (no HDMI CEC; until recently no HDMI eARC) but you pay over $10,000 for the room correction.

Like many things, no room correction to basic room correction is a bigger leap from Audyssey to Dirac to anything else.

@jhaider has both Dirac and RoomPerfect. Any comments?

I don’t understand why the microphone needs to be set up at random positions unknown to the system. How can the software make any sense out of this? You intuitively expect the software needs to know where you place the microphone, or do I miss something?

 

[amirm]

I don’t understand why the microphone needs to be set up at random positions unknown to the system. How can the software make any sense out of this? You intuitively expect the software needs to know where you place the microphone, or do I miss something?

They are trying to find the position independent impact of the room. To the extent the measurements correlate regardless of location of the mic, they can apply that correction.

For that reason their correction is not optimal for a single seat.

 

[Endibol]

They are trying to find the position independent impact of the room. To the extent the measurements correlate regardless of location of the mic, they can apply that correction.

For that reason their correction is not optimal for a single seat.

Ah, that’s what they aim for.. but how do they deal with room modes in this approach?
An interesting approach for sure.

 

[danstahl]

??? The 10 dB deduction is already reflected in the measurements. You shouldn't subtract it again.

This seems unlikely to me unless it wasn't tested in pure direct? I had assumed all processors/receivers were being measured with minimal processing to get as true an estimate for the dac performance as possible.

 

[GXAlan]

I don’t understand why the microphone needs to be set up at random positions unknown to the system. How can the software make any sense out of this? You intuitively expect the software needs to know where you place the microphone, or do I miss something?

It’s a black box but it works.

li have zero knowledge of what is actually happening, but if I wanted to do imagine the best case scenario.

Meyer Sound says that room modes are not random and they use a nice animation of a corkscrew.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/room-mode-calculator-and-speaker-placement.1474568/

“Calculating modes is easy: divide the speed of sound by a room dimension. 1130 ÷ 16 = 70.6 (round up to 71). But 71Hz is not your first width mode because half a wave can bounce back and forth between your side walls and complete a wavelength. So your first width mode is at 35Hz, and multiples thereof (71Hz, 106Hz, 141Hz, etc).”

So if you move around randomly, and Room Perfect is just focusing below the transition frequency, it might be able to guess that the dimensions of the room are.

This also gets into the fact that “most” homes have studs that are 16 or 24 inches apart or 60 cm apart, so it gets another constraint to try to guess the room dimensions if it sees. So if 20 and 40 Hz seem pretty consistent at all the random measurements but you see the up and down results at 35 Hz, it would know that that variability is from the room.

 

[amirm]

This seems unlikely to me unless it wasn't tested in pure direct? I had assumed all processors/receivers were being measured with minimal processing to get as true an estimate for the dac performance as possible.

They should do that but they don't. I have talked to some companies about having such an optimized path so we may see it in the future.

 

[amirm]

Ah, that’s what they aim for.. but how do they deal with room modes in this approach?

The wavelengths are large enough that they would stand out in a number of measurements. With some bias to listening spot, you can correct for them. See this example from Harman:

That mode at 48 Hz or so remains regardless of seating position. The average line would give pretty good guidance as a result. But per above, you can give priority to seating position.

 

[baylessmp]

I own a MP-50 and RP is easily the best and most user friendly room correction software I’ve used. My 9-channel theater system is in a vaulted ceiling living room open to the second floor of my house. It’s a very challenging room for a sound system. I’ve tried Anthem, Yamaha, Denon, Emotiva, and NAD products and nothing came close to the end result I got from RP. I also didn’t need a professional calibrator to get truly awesome performance. It’s amazing software, the UI is super polished, and the sub integration is ace.

 

[jhaider]

From your posts, I think you have used room correction quite extensively.

In your opinion, do you think Room Perfect can do what Dirac does? Nuanced takes are most welcome.

The short answer is "no"...and Dirac can't do what RP does, either!

The systems just have different goals and outcomes. Dirac's primary goal is to fit a measured listening position response to a target curve. (Dirac is not alone there: ARC, Audyssey, GLM, MA-1, Trinnov all follow the same general approach, though obviously GLM and MA-1 have a leg up in that they "know" the base performance of the loudspeakers.) Generally IME it performs well at that task, though measurement protocols have IMO gotten buggier over time and the frustration factor has risen. (Some of that may be due to computer OS changes as well, in fairness to Dirac.) The biggest determinant of perceived success with Dirac (assuming successful measurements) is the user's choice of target curve. Also there's some question if full band correction based on listening area response is the correct approach (see, e.g. Toole, Sound Reproduction, Section 5.7.3), though with good loudspeakers reasonably placed and a reasonable listening position I've found it doesn't actually matter much. There won't be much correction above the transition frequency anyway. Dirac IMO doesn't really become great until DLBC, because what it can do (given certain constraints, such as sufficient headroom in each individual subwoofer) really improves evenness at the listening position and around the room. And bass smoothness is really IMO the whole point of room correction.

RP's aim, by contrast, is not to fit the speakers' listening position response to some curve, but rather to map out the room relative to the loudspeakers (as determined by a scan at the listening position) and apply processing to mitigate the colorations from the room. RP is also designed to work with a novel system system setup concept: on wall speakers with "boundary subs," put another way, an evolution of Roy Allison's placement concepts using DSP. (Dirac ART will also shine in such configurations.) It's doable, if you have the time windows needed to set up measurement equipment, take a bunch of measurements, analyze, listen, and start over again. I tried. I ended up throwing in the towel because I wanted to spent time listening rather than optimizing, and bought something with DLBC. Maybe 20 minutes of measurements (2 mains, 5 subs), maybe 30 minutes of tweaking crossover points and bass shelf on screen, and done.

Subjectively, IMO the choice between base Dirac and RP favors RP in most cases. RP integrates subs (with a number of different options) and basic Dirac is Wild West on that hugely important aspect of in-room performance. However, the choice between DLBC and RP is less clear cut. You need to have more patience to use DLBC, but DLBC is an order of magnitude or four less time and effort compared to manual multisub setup. I will say that TDAI-1120 may not have been such a no-brainer for me for the guest room had NAD lived up to their promises and equipped their little M10 with DLBC.

 

[Paffi]

Subjectively, IMO the choice between base Dirac and RP favors RP in most cases.

Funny, how I thought the last years, I´m the only one who prefers room correction like RoomPerfect over DIRAC and now it turns out, by this thread, there more of us. Sometimes I felt blamed by slapping the holy cow "dirac" If roomperfect would have worked in my specific use case, I would have kept it and would have been done. No fizzeling with REW anymore.

Many of the people here, criticizing the hardware performance and the price of the unit, overseeing the whole point of the total system performance - the result, coming out of the loudspeaker and somebody is listening to, is much more affected by the room correction software than the performance of the dac. I would always prefer this processor over an processor with sota dac (which makes no difference because it´s inaudible) but without proper software (audible).... some priorities should maybe reallocated. It´s like apple in the past, many complaining about the expensive hardware but in the end, it was the software you were paying for.

 

[jhaider]

Funny, how I thought the last years, I´m the only one who prefers room correction like RoomPerfect over DIRAC and now it turns out, by this thread, there more of us. Sometimes I felt blamed by slapping the holy cow "dirac"

To be clear, I think both DLBC and RP are great.

 

[Holmz]

DIRAC aims to also fix the impulse response.
Lyngdorf intentionally aims to not change the :character“ of the speakers.
In fact Lyngdorf said that there earlier work made all the speakers sound the same, and people wanted to keep the character of their speakers,
(Which sort of implies that that all the speakers were not perfect, as if they were then the “after corrections” all sounded the same… implies that they were more towards perfect.)

In a perfect world, speakers would have a perfect impulse or step function response, or at least be corrected with something like DIRAC to produce a more perfect response.
There is no way to get a more towards a perfect time domain dirac impulse response without it getting sharper… but whether one also smooths out the frequency response is optional.
Just like one can fix the frequency domain without addressing the time domain.

Then the room would be corrected either with RP, or some other EQ method, or a combination of that… and possibly also with some bass management.

 

[olegtern]

"Fully Automatic Loudspeaker-Room Adaptation - The RoomPerfect System" for those who need more information on how it works.

The only thing I don't like about RoomPerfect is the increase in group delay around 500 Hz after applying the correction. They claim it's not audible, but I don't think so. Other than that it's a really smart thing that does a great job with correction.

 

[Calleberg]

Again, thanks @amirm for including another set of comparable measurements. This time the "Stereophile 50Hz distorsion spectra".

Eventually there might be an informal standard set of measurements that "everyone" presents.

(For poweramps My personal favorites are the 19-20kHz IMD spectrum at close to the clipping "knee" and any form of demanding reactive load testing. I miss the old Powercube tests.)

 

[Titurel]

Make no mistake, the Lyngdorf MP 40 2.1 is a deep product and its documentation is rather Spartan. Still, I was able to achieve acceptable results using Room Perfect in a little over 30 minutes. Putting acceptable in context, I mean better sound than I ever achieved with Audyssey (Marantz AV8805) and equal to the best I could wrench from Dirac Live (NAD m17 v2) after many hours of REW-aided tweaks. Three months down the road since purchase, I'm happy as a clam, enjoying better sound than I've ever heard in my room. Even after replacing my subs, repositioning my center and main speaker positions, and replacing their amps, I'm on only on Room Perfect run number 5. I ran Dirac more times than that just to get to acceptable. (In fairness, my listening room is problematic.)

Is it perfect. No, but neither am I.

 

[Holmz]

…

Is it perfect. No, but neither am I.

My wife says I am more perfect for a barn or outdoors setting, but she allows in a room... even though I am not room perfect.

 

[Vacceo]

The short answer is "no"...and Dirac can't do what RP does, either!

The systems just have different goals and outcomes. Dirac's primary goal is to fit a measured listening position response to a target curve. (Dirac is not alone there: ARC, Audyssey, GLM, MA-1, Trinnov all follow the same general approach, though obviously GLM and MA-1 have a leg up in that they "know" the base performance of the loudspeakers.) Generally IME it performs well at that task, though measurement protocols have IMO gotten buggier over time and the frustration factor has risen. (Some of that may be due to computer OS changes as well, in fairness to Dirac.) The biggest determinant of perceived success with Dirac (assuming successful measurements) is the user's choice of target curve. Also there's some question if full band correction based on listening area response is the correct approach (see, e.g. Toole, Sound Reproduction, Section 5.7.3), though with good loudspeakers reasonably placed and a reasonable listening position I've found it doesn't actually matter much. There won't be much correction above the transition frequency anyway. Dirac IMO doesn't really become great until DLBC, because what it can do (given certain constraints, such as sufficient headroom in each individual subwoofer) really improves evenness at the listening position and around the room. And bass smoothness is really IMO the whole point of room correction.

RP's aim, by contrast, is not to fit the speakers' listening position response to some curve, but rather to map out the room relative to the loudspeakers (as determined by a scan at the listening position) and apply processing to mitigate the colorations from the room. RP is also designed to work with a novel system system setup concept: on wall speakers with "boundary subs," put another way, an evolution of Roy Allison's placement concepts using DSP. (Dirac ART will also shine in such configurations.) It's doable, if you have the time windows needed to set up measurement equipment, take a bunch of measurements, analyze, listen, and start over again. I tried. I ended up throwing in the towel because I wanted to spent time listening rather than optimizing, and bought something with DLBC. Maybe 20 minutes of measurements (2 mains, 5 subs), maybe 30 minutes of tweaking crossover points and bass shelf on screen, and done.

Subjectively, IMO the choice between base Dirac and RP favors RP in most cases. RP integrates subs (with a number of different options) and basic Dirac is Wild West on that hugely important aspect of in-room performance. However, the choice between DLBC and RP is less clear cut. You need to have more patience to use DLBC, but DLBC is an order of magnitude or four less time and effort compared to manual multisub setup. I will say that TDAI-1120 may not have been such a no-brainer for me for the guest room had NAD lived up to their promises and equipped their little M10 with DLBC.

Thanks for the details! Perhaps we could say that Dirac has a certain advantage due to being avalible in a larger variety of devices, but that is not RP´s fault in any way.