auto calibration

Last night I reran the audo calibration for my 5.1 set up. Dang it's loud.. scares the crap out of me every time it goes from speaker to speaker.

Anyway... after the auto setup was finished.. i went in and checked the delay settings and calibration settings.

The settings for most speakers was --- only the front left and right had any kind of setting next to it.. which was Left - 1 and Right +1 all the others had that ---

So this morning I turned it on... and all speakers now have some kind of either negative or positive number listed next to it. rears are -7 and -6 respectively.. etc.

I found that the auto calibration did make things sound better. Do you know if the tone it sends out it at reference level?

I didn't have my SPL meter handy to see what level the auto-calibration test tones hit, but I do remember that it was loud, probably a bit louder than the manual test tones - that's why I don't run auto-setup when anybody else is home.

Either the autocalibration tones are at reference level, or the manual ones are, or neither are.

Based on past experience with other gear, I'd say the manual tones are closer to reference (75db) level than the auto tones.

Personally, I found the autocalibration useful for the delay values, but I ended up doing the other settings manually, particularly for my passive sub which the autocalibration routine seemed unable to detect.

The manual tones are set up so that 0dB volume will yield 75dB on a meter when calibrating to reference level. The auto-calibration tones do feel louder, but that may due to be the way they cycle on and off during the testing or perhaps even the type of tone used (I seem to remember the auto setup uses two different tones, one that seemed to be at a higher frequency than the other).