Congrats on your purchase. I am sure you will enjoy the sound all the more as the unit burns in and opens up.
Meanwhile, I have also closed on my purchase with Pioneer Elite LX-303. I am also getting them paired with Q accoustics 3010i + stock wall mounts and the centre 3090Ci. Will share my experience once I receive and set them up. The dual connectivity setup with PM6004 amp and 3050s continues to pose a challenge. Not to too keen on the speaker switch stuff and possible losses. For now I may just connect the AV in isolation and experience the change. Cheers!
Here's my 1 week experience of the new setup:
I have wired the L+R speakers independently with the AVR. I know this can go to the Pioneer owner's thread, but this in relation to my Marantz setup too:
Initial impressions on completing the Auto MCACC (like the Audessy) equalization.
MCACC setup was fairly simple and quite accurate
Movie play - On a 5.0 setup, I could see that it was a lot content driven there is a reasonable difference (wrt Stereo) in immersive effect especially when I ran "Insurgent" of BD quality or a "Gravity" for that matter. Compared it with direct play as well and could see the impact of processing a 2 -channel audio to a 5.0 Dolby surround/action. There is a lot to do with your individual preference but the AVR reproduces faithfully with decent details. Noticed some lacking bass. But without a sub, I may have to live with it.
On music front with a stereo mode, I played several files across genres from Diana Krall's Temptation, Uriah Heep's July Morning, Deep Purple -"Blind man Cries" to the heavy nos like Metallica's "One", "fade to Black" & even Jagjit Singh's Ghazals
One blatant difference - "Brighter", good details, low bass. Somewhere, I was missing the punch I was used to. So I moved the front channels speakers to the good old Marantz 6004 and there you go - simply nothing to beat the warmth and rich sound ! Maybe lesser details. And with the maveric Tube magic D2, there are two analog output options to play a Tube out for music or the sharper discrete output.
Notice an almost similar effect on driving the AVR Pre-amp through Zone 2. Flip side, net sources (like Amazon music/ chomecast) do not play on Zone 2 which essentially means I would need to switch speaker wires everytime when needed.
A bit disappointed at my new buy, I studied through the exhausitive Pioneer manual and there was hope!
There were whole lot of options under AV adjust viz i) Full MCACC Auto/manual / off. ii) MCACC equaliser options /Off iii) Audio absorber (Upscale), and the list goes on.
All these were at default values so far. These options can be controlled on the fly while the audio to match individual preferences and content.
I made several changes on a realtime mode and voila! - the results were encouraging. Decent base, Not as close to the warmth of the Marantz but pretty good. The upscale option is the most amazing in especially the low bit rate / 128 kbps mp3 files.
So no regrets. Overall, a great package for Movie play and some music (60/40). For real music lovers, the marantz stands out unmistakebly. I now wait for the Beresford speaker switch with biwiring options..
Next project will be to re-consider biwiring and Biamping the 7th channel on receiving the equipment.
Will try when i get an opportunity in any local FM place..
