Everyone in this forum, i am quite pleased to find out that seem to respect deeply Dr Floyd Toole's suggestions, in all aspects of audio.
All? Maybe sometimes excluding just one, the one regarding the proved and undeniable multiple benefits of the multichannel immersive setup, which is quite obvious if you read his book, and of course it is stated even in this forum:
Of course, part of these suggestions is based not only on science, but it is also strengthened with listening experience and validation.
Listening validation of the findings is quite crucial in so many aspects of audio, and for many reasons, and IMHO not to find the best listening impression's, but mainly for the need to validate the usefulness of measurements, because some things can be measured quite easily, but they are not audible, so in these cases what's the point of measuring other than for the shake of stacking useless science books? Certainly, there's no point for consumers, and let me remind you the fact of audibility of distortion, jitter in the digital domain, higher resolution of digital audio, etc.. and please do not forget cables. Power cables, much more expensive than a car.
Yes, we can measure power cables, but what's the point?
I suppose that measurements for multichannel avr's are quite complex, and some really very easy listening findings (for example this marantz avr is just rubbish compared to this nad or this anthem or emotiva avr) but the provided technical specifications, or even the measurements from ASR doesn't help at all.
I am a guy of measurements and pdf's, i spit on listening impression's, even mine.
But i am in the awkward position to state that higher sinad numbers and output voltages and thd measurements of these av processors, doesn't really mean anything in real life. Yes, it is a proof of excellent engineering. So?
I just point to the need of other, more sophisticated ways of measuring the performance of an immersive setup and the components it is made of.
I suspect that complex measurements provided by reproducing immersive recorded material in BD audio tracks with Dolby Atmos flag, including sweeps, tones, pink noise, etc, after full calibration and setting a reasonable target curve, is the way to go.
Every speaker should be measured separately, but also all of them together. It is crucial to find out how well they can recreate all together the one simple object, in an object oriented immersive setup, in the same way a tone of 1kHz is measured in a DAC (and something similar to multitone measuring, which "translates" to multiple objects in 3D space).
Trinnov's 3D microphone is quite different from the plain single capsule microphones used by other manufacturers. I think Trinnov knows better.
These are my thoughts, and even if i don't think that a higher sinad number is needed, or even 4Vrms outputs, of course i evaluate every possible measurement i can get, and i deeply respect what Amir is doing here.
I only hope that better ways of complex measurements are discovered, so that a higher score in measurements really point to a better sounding avr, as is the case with a simple 2 channel DAC.