990 Auto Calibration

Is the Auto Cal. on the 990 the same as on the Sherwood P-965? I ran the AC today on the Sherwood and the results were remarkably different than using an SPL meter with the P-965 test tones.( It was also different with the DVE DVD) The AC also set all my speakers to Large -even the surounds.

I am not complaining as it actually sounds pretty decent in my room- But why so different? I am FINALLY getting my new HT in order and I am just trying to dial it in as perfectly as possible. All these variations are driving me nuts :p

I think that aside from some possible software tweaks (the 990's software bears some significant differences from the P-965's software), the two use the same hardware at least. Several people have reported cases where the 990 tried to set surrounds to large instead of small. One thing to keep in mind - both units use a subwoofer test tone that is full-range. Because of this, Outlaw recommends that users turn on the crossover in their sub (on the LFM-1, this means flipping the X-OVER switch from "BYPASS" to "ACTIVE") and setting it to its highest position (around 180Hz on the LFM-1) before running auto-calibration or before calibrating the sub with the built-in test tone. This may help the P-965's auto-calibration give you more accurate results.

Thanks. I tried that and it still insists on setting the speakers to Large and everything else is the same. I guess I will just stick with the good old SPL.

There are clearly some wrinkles in the autocalibration. It wanted to make ALL of my speakers small and they are ALL quite capable of producing bass down to 40-60hz.

I generally run the auto calibration to get the delays set up appropriately. Then I go back and manually reconfigure all the speakers to LARGE, change the sub to L+R/LFE and set the crossover points manually. I have the Maggies set at 40hz and everything else set at 60hz.

That seems to work for me.

Now if we can just get that firmware update. Having my inputs spontaneously change from Bypass or Upsample to PLII is driving me nuts.

Cheers,