In reply to Doodski, its not fair to claim the AVR390 isnt a worthwhile receiver based on electric tests rather than listening.
Fully agreed!
Im here for the comments and try to steer people in the proper direction based on my real world experience.
I respect your opinion based on your real world experience, but I don't know about "in the proper direction", as mentioned often, once own experience based on one's subjective observations/impressions are subjective, hard to know if that could, or should be considered proper without defining what proper means.
When he tests his gear on the bench, is the gear connected to a power conditioner? Any kind of power spike can throw these measurements off. And to answer your question...No. i dont know most of what these measurements mean. Im not an engineer but the people who designed Arcam for the last 50 years are and im quite sure they have better equipment then Audio Science guy.
That might have been a valid point, but Amir measured so many devices so if something like that would have thrown those measurements off he would know it, even we, who have looked at almost every single AVRs/AVPs he measured, would know, as least know to suspect the results and asked him about it.
Amir did mention that the one he reviewed was a refurbished unit so may be there was some issues right there. Interestingly, the relatively poor measured performance on the were based on HDMI input, but in pure direct mode using analog inputs, the performance jumped to 92 dB SINAD, that's excellent!
Not that on that same chart, the Denon AVR-X3500H wasn't too far behind, so I was not surprised to find my AVR-X3400H (returned it for the X4400H after 2 weeks) and AVR-X4400H performed better than my Marantz AV8801. If your Denon sounded the way it was to you, I would suspect there could other reasons, such as setting, or whatever, the might have escaped your noticing at the time if you only compared the two briefly. I never doubted the Arcam can sound really good, but I do doubt the Denon would sound so much less good.
Even the relatively poor performance when HDMI input was used, SINAD of 81 dB, or 0.009% THD+N still would put it in the below audibility threshold so we should not be surprised we find this AVR nice sounding.
I agree with Peng. Nice reply sir. May i ask what amps you were using with the marantz 8801? I loved the surround capabilities of the MRX series, however i found them to be glitchy. Loud pops between changing bitstream and PCM audio formats.
In my HT application I was using it with the Anthem MCA20, Outlaw M2200 (for the LCR), and Marantz MM8003 (for the surround/height channels). After I demoted it to my second, or third stereo systems I had tired it with at least 3 or 4 of my power amps including the Halo A21, Bryston 4B SST, a buckeye amp and a Purifi amp made by VTV.
Again, funny you mentioned Anthem's, I had owned two AVM70s, the first one (4K, that I traded in for the 8K model) also had the occasional loud pops that would come anywhere but mostly on my left surround speaker and it would only do it when something's change in the content, such as when watching YT stuff, when the show returned after commercials. The second unit did it only a few times for the whole time, and I was nicely surprised. Better still, for months now it never popped again so I assume the last couple of FW updates fixed it.. If you still own one of those, you should make sure you are at the newest FW version.
Lastly, I would highlight the fact that the Arcam did not do bad at all in some measurements such as the one below:
Clearly, in direct mode, analog input, this thing had much better measurements than the Denon AVR-X4700H, infinitely better than the NAD T758V3, that also managed to impressed their owners, at least some of them.
Bottom line, distortions, if better than say even 70 dB SINAD, is not a good indicator for perceived sound quality at all. As Amir mentioned many times, measurements that are not good enough for him to put the devices in his recommended list did not mean the poorer performance in some of those tests would be "audible".
