Where Did All the Gimmicky DSP Modes Go — And Did Anyone Actually Use Them?

[tengiz]

Remember all those old AVR sound modes like "Stadium," "Hall," "Jazz Club," and "Church"? They used to be everywhere - loaded with artificial reverb and odd EQ to simulate different environments. These days, they’ve mostly disappeared from modern receivers.

Personally, I’m glad they’re gone. In real rooms they just clashed with the natural acoustics and made everything sound muddy or fake.

But it got me wondering:

• Why were these modes so common in the first place?
• Were they ever actually useful outside of heavily treated rooms?
• Did anyone genuinely like them or use them regularly?
• Are there any valid use cases I’m overlooking?

Curious to hear what others think - nostalgia, gimmick, or misunderstood feature?

 

[ryanosaur]

Just shop Yamaha!

 

[DVDdoug]

I didn't know they were gone but I read somewhere that Dolby Pro Logic was going-away (or gone) and I believe these are Pro Logic II features.

I like using a "hall" or "theater" effect with stereo music for some delayed reverb in rear and the "feel" of a bigger room. I prefer a larger room and I've had my speakers in a large room a couple of times and they sound a lot better than in my living room. Live performances usually have natural "large room" reverb coming from all directions.

I thought Atmos has some upmixing features but my older 5.1 AVR doesn't support Atmos.

 

[Curvature]

Did anyone genuinely like them or use them regularly?

I thought the reverb sounded good but pulled a blanket of sameness over everything. Outside of trying a few times I ignored it. I usually listened in "direct" mode.

I'd like to know the history of this feature as well.

 

[kemmler3D]

I'm firmly in the "gimmick" camp on this, at least for 2-channel.

 

[GXAlan]

Remember all those old AVR sound modes like "Stadium," "Hall," "Jazz Club," and "Church"? They used to be everywhere - loaded with artificial reverb and odd EQ to simulate different environments. These days, they’ve mostly disappeared from modern receivers.

Personally, I’m glad they’re gone. In real rooms they just clashed with the natural acoustics and made everything sound muddy or fake.

But it got me wondering:

• Why were these modes so common in the first place?

Yamaha CinemaDSP really worked. Everyone tried to copy it with the cheap reverb effects you mentioned, which were bad.

@restorer-john can add insight. There were AES papers on Yamaha traveling the world and using 24/96 mic records to analyze real world environments.

• Were they ever actually useful outside of heavily treated rooms?
• Did anyone genuinely like them or use them regularly?
• Are there any valid use cases I’m overlooking?

Curious to hear what others think - nostalgia, gimmick, or misunderstood feature?

I really like the CX-A5100 for a 11 channel system and it holds its own against my Trinnov Altitude 32. The “sci-fi” preset makes the room bigger without sounding artificial.

 

[antisuck]

Yamaha CinemaDSP really worked. Everyone tried to copy it with the cheap reverb effects you mentioned, which were bad.

@restorer-john can add insight. There were AES papers on Yamaha traveling the world and using 24/96 mic records to analyze real world environments.



I really like the CX-A5100 for a 11 channel system and it holds its own against my Trinnov Altitude 32. The “sci-fi” preset makes the room bigger without sounding artificial.

I'm on my second Yamaha AVR (RX-A4A, only upgraded because I use the AVR as the hub of my A/V system and I needed it to do 4k video) and I never touched the DSP reverbs. All this time I had no idea they were serious convolution programs along the lines of my precious Altiverb plugin.

 

[Laika2]

Remember all those old AVR sound modes like "Stadium," "Hall," "Jazz Club," and "Church"? They used to be everywhere - loaded with artificial reverb and odd EQ to simulate different environments. These days, they’ve mostly disappeared from modern receivers.

Personally, I’m glad they’re gone. In real rooms they just clashed with the natural acoustics and made everything sound muddy or fake.

But it got me wondering:

• Why were these modes so common in the first place?
• Were they ever actually useful outside of heavily treated rooms?
• Did anyone genuinely like them or use them regularly?
• Are there any valid use cases I’m overlooking?

Curious to hear what others think - nostalgia, gimmick, or misunderstood feature?

I had a Sony in the 5.1 days, it had maybe 20 or 30 of those, some claiming to duplicate named major concert halls the claimed they Mike to duplicate the sound of the hall. I messed with them on music for awhile. The best that ever happened was a single song now and then benefited the sound to my ears, issue was it was rare, who switches to different sound fields back and forth depending on what track you are on on a CD.

To me it's a selling point for the uneducated. I can see the salesman, but this one has 30 soundfields never pointing out there is no real use for 25 of them.

 

[Sal1950]

Remember all those old AVR sound modes like "Stadium," "Hall," "Jazz Club," and "Church"? They used to be everywhere - loaded with artificial reverb and odd EQ to simulate different environments. These days, they’ve mostly disappeared from modern receivers.

Personally, I’m glad they’re gone. In real rooms they just clashed with the natural acoustics and made everything sound muddy or fake.

But it got me wondering:

• Why were these modes so common in the first place?
• Were they ever actually useful outside of heavily treated rooms?
• Did anyone genuinely like them or use them regularly?
• Are there any valid use cases I’m overlooking?

Curious to hear what others think - nostalgia, gimmick, or misunderstood feature?

I never used them personally, just different variations on a reverb plate and they all sounded too phony to me..
If getting 2ch up to surround was the goal, better to just get an old Dynaco Quad adapter to extract some real ambience.

 

[GXAlan]

All this time I had no idea they were serious convolution programs along the lines of my precious Altiverb plugin.

Try Sci-Fi. It’s the most “neutral” enhancement which works great with all movies even dramas. What makes it sci fi is that it tries to preserve the localization info (for sfx) more, which is also a way it is more neutral.

The music ones do depend on the recording.

But only Yamaha implements this “real” DSP.

 

[ryanosaur]

Hall effects are partly reverb, but also EQd as I understood it. Some of these I've seen as GEQ where you get all the silly old-school EQ tabs that make smileys, frowneys, whatever, all to emphasize different tonal characteristics.

 

[ThatM1key]

When I had my surround setup with my Sony STR-DN1080, I really liked using the "Dolby Surround" movie effect for music. That effect separated the voices and instruments pretty well (Voices were moved to the center speaker).

For DVDDoug:

When it came to "Height" decoding, it was annoying at first with the DSP modes. "Direct" mode does not extract the Dolby Atmos metadata from Dolby TrueHD tracks but "AFD" mode does. I didn't really fool around much with using the Height DSP modes with regular 5.1 movies.

When I used to have Yamaha RX-V367. It seemed like a good chunk of them suffered from dead HDMI boards or maybe I missed remembered? The one I had a dead HDMI board and it wasn't the end of the world since it was a basic DD/DTS receiver. Anyways, It had a lot of DSP modes. I really don't think the DSP modes were "Deep and Calculated" like Yamaha says (At least for this cheap receiver).

 

[Pareto Pragmatic]

I think things will make more sense when you think of these as features added on to the "surround sound system I got for my TV."

So, back in the day, when such filters were more common and touted, what would someone do? Buy a 5.1 system and plop the speakers on either side of the TV (against a wall?, asymmetrical to the room?), stick the center channel in the "entertainment center", and do goodness knows what with the sub and surrounds. Then they would auto correct. And it would sound GREAT! At least in comparison to the TV speakers.

How would that sound in stereo, or direct? Chances are, horrible. So actually, I would say filters are more likely to be useful in poorly treated and poorly set up rooms. Any heavily treated room, a person who does that is going stereo 99.99% of the time, I think.

So the question for MOST users would be does the "music" filter sound better for music than the "movie" filter? I am sure some do like a music filter better, I find them to make the soundstage bigger, clearly bigger. But not my thing, but I can see how it would appeal to people who had not heard quality 2 channel before.

The only time I use one, Dolby PL-music, is when the wall air con is on, which cools our first floor. Likely won't bother, but it is a bit easier to hear things with more speakers involved, with a very loud noise source in the room. That is a VERY narrow use case, for sure, but I find it mildly useful.

 

[tengiz]

I think things will make more sense when you think of these as features added on to the "surround sound system I got for my TV."

So, back in the day, when such filters were more common and touted, what would someone do? Buy a 5.1 system and plop the speakers on either side of the TV (against a wall?, asymmetrical to the room?), stick the center channel in the "entertainment center", and do goodness knows what with the sub and surrounds. Then they would auto correct. And it would sound GREAT! At least in comparison to the TV speakers.

How would that sound in stereo, or direct? Chances are, horrible. So actually, I would say filters are more likely to be useful in poorly treated and poorly set up rooms. Any heavily treated room, a person who does that is going stereo 99.99% of the time, I think.

Yes, this makes sense.

To me, it wasn’t even hit-or-miss - it was more like gazillion missed and one near-hit. Most of the time, it just didn’t work. Only a few recordings with very subtle reverb or ambient content sounded okay in surround, and even then, it was rare for the 5.1 mix to actually improve on the stereo version that already had some reverb.

Once in a while, I’d stumble on a track that felt a bit more spacious or enveloping with surround effects, but those were the exceptions. In general, it didn’t enhance anything - it just made the sound less coherent. No signal processing can extract "the artistic intent" from ones and zeros. Most of the time, it just added clutter.

But hey - if it helped sell receivers and made it economically feasible for the industry to keep going, who am I to complain?

 

[Chrispy]

Not something I found useful much, but mostly what I had in my Sony rather than other brands (never had a Yamaha which seems to have the most of these?). Depends, tho....it might be useful for your source, maybe not.

 

[Mnyb]

I think good upmixing made these obsolete , you can get very nice results from atmos or trifield or similar that suits music without getting gimmicky

 

[Sal1950]

I think good upmixing made these obsolete , you can get very nice results from atmos or trifield or similar that suits music without getting gimmicky

Yep, Dolby Digital, Auro, and DTS-Neural upmixers have all done much better jobs than any of the reverb adders ever did, some better than others.

 

[Petrushka]

They were enormously inconvenient, because even if you liked an effect on one recording, it wouldn’t sound good on the next.