SME Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 How many here, given knowledge of the Oppo clipping have replaced their players/processors with alternatives that don't clip? Do you notice a difference in scenes that were known to clip before? I know that when I calibrated my sub gains to play with the AVR sub trim at -9 instead of 0, I noticed a big improvement. Note that if Audyssey is used on these AVRs, it will steal more headroom anywhere that it boosts the signal. I use my MiniDSP 2x4 for sub correction now, so Audyssey does very little boosting. My best guess is that the Denon and Marantz use fairly similar digital processing. I believe when I posted about headroom limitations of the Denon to the main Bass Content thread several months ago, I got a reply from someone who indicated similar limits were present on his Marantz model of the same year. And now for an unrelated point. Just this week, I believe I discovered a bug in the digital processing on my Denon 3313CI receiver. I will do some more tests maybe tomorrow to confirm it, but given the data I've reviewed so far, my suspicion of the Denon being at fault (specifically, a firmware version I installed some time last year) is very strong. The gist of the bug is that the signal processing introduces a frequency and temporal response anomaly, but only in the left channel. I have been aware of the frequency response part of the problem for a while because I noticed my own home brew room correction system trying to "correct it". I assumed it was my speaker, not my AVR. What I didn't notice until two days ago is that the artifact introduces a significant amount of pre-ringing! That is to say that in my measured impulse response, I see oscillation at the frequency in question that starts 10-15 ms before the impulse arrives! Speakers don't do that, and for that matter, it's very hard to get any analog equipment to do that on purpose. Anyway, once I've confirmed it's still there after switching the pre-outs around, I'll probably put a detailed and graphically illustrated post on the appropriate product thread on AVS Forum to try to get others to reproduce it. It will be interesting to see whether I or anyone else can actually get through to D&M's engineers about this, since they should be able to correct it with a firmware upgrade. My guess is that there's a typo in the source code for a single filter coefficient somewhere, perhaps in a sample rate converter. Fun stuff. Thankfully, it's nowhere near as severe as this oppo flaw! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeastAudio Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 For any who are using the HDMI to bitstream, the oppo should be just fine no? It does pass the burden onto the AVR/PRE at that point to do the decoding, successfully avoiding where the Oppo fails... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bossobass Dave Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 For any who are using the HDMI to bitstream, the oppo should be just fine no? It does pass the burden onto the AVR/PRE at that point to do the decoding, successfully avoiding where the Oppo fails... True, but you're paying over a grand just for the Sabre DACs/analog circuitry for the 105. If you're not going to use that and just bitstream the digits to a pre/pro/AVR, then get a generic cheapo player and put the $$ into a pre/pro that doesn't shit the bed with modern soundtrack source. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeastAudio Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 True, but you're paying over a grand just for the Sabre DACs/analog circuitry for the 105. If you're not going to use that and just bitstream the digits to a pre/pro/AVR, then get a generic cheapo player and put the $$ into a pre/pro that doesn't shit the bed with modern soundtrack source. Absolutely. I will say though, that bitstreaming (for atmos/auro) from the oppo 103 to the 7702 has worked out quite well for me so far. The oppos do have many other things that make them nice players, it is totally unfortunate that one of the areas they pride themselves on the most is so terrible tho... With that said, the immersive sound codecs so far have been an absolute BLAST to play around with. I did get 8 new radian 10" coaxial drivers in this week, that I will be switching out all surrounds for, and that should vault performance even more. It will be the first time I have a full matching set of surrounds so timbre, response, etc. should be much more on par and cohesive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bossobass Dave Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 Absolutely. I will say though, that bitstreaming (for atmos/auro) from the oppo 103 to the 7702 has worked out quite well for me so far. The oppos do have many other things that make them nice players, it is totally unfortunate that one of the areas they pride themselves on the most is so terrible tho... With that said, the immersive sound codecs so far have been an absolute BLAST to play around with. I did get 8 new radian 10" coaxial drivers in this week, that I will be switching out all surrounds for, and that should vault performance even more. It will be the first time I have a full matching set of surrounds so timbre, response, etc. should be much more on par and cohesive. Sounds awesome, and I'm jealous. You absolutely have to run the sub out of the AV7702 into speclab and graph the earth to echo or chapter 17 of interstellar scenes to see if the waveform graph is clipped like the oppo vs panny test we did. If you don't, I'll wait to get the 7702 until it has DTS-X and gloat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeastAudio Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 I don't even have sL at this point So there would definitely be a learning curve to overcome first. I am not opposed to it tho. I still owe you loopbacks too.... i haven't forgotten If you are holding on for the 7702 to get DTS-X, I hope it's not your breathe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shredhead Posted August 21, 2015 Author Report Share Posted August 21, 2015 So apparently Oppo put out a firmware upgrade beta that among other things is claiming to "Resolved a bass management issue where the subwoofer would clip when 0 dB signals were sent to all channels when one speaker was set to small". I took a few measurements before the upgrade and after. Let's see about this. I used maxmercy's WCS disc and only re-directed 1 channel with the full strength LFE track at 40Hz. Looks promising. Let's re-direct 5 channels and compare: Crap, still not enough headroom for a worst case scenario but hey fair enough, that's a torture test so let's move on to the main thing that matters: real world WCS from a hot disc. I picked Interstellar eject scene: Still squashed, -no noticeable change. Looks like 1 full level channel of re-directed bass is not enough headroom for real world content to be reproduced accurately. Here is what the eject scene looks like on a dynamic decoder: Just to be sure I checked the ship scene at the end of Earth to Echo as well. This is after the firmware push: Squash-zilla. This is what it's supposed to look like. Note: the shot below is a longer timescale than above but you get the idea. Well, nice try Oppo. I appreciate the effort even though I'm pissed off that you guys address this issue after repeatedly telling me that it isn't an issue that is their responsibility to address and blaming the source material for the distortion. Oppo should hire Point One Technologies as a consultant on this problem. We will let you know how much headroom is enough and hey, if it raises the noise floor... you guys will just have to put the work into laying out your design so that it has low noise like everyone else does. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madaeel Posted August 22, 2015 Report Share Posted August 22, 2015 Dammit well it didn't have the newest codecs so I'm not that upset, but who the fuck checked this beforehand and gave it the thumbs up at Oppo...I mean at Poop?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spacebug Posted August 22, 2015 Report Share Posted August 22, 2015 Good that they made an effort at least.... But to be fair the firmware description says one channel redirected, which it seems to pass... Could it be they misunderstood the number of redirected channels? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SME Posted August 22, 2015 Report Share Posted August 22, 2015 Wow, what a disappointment. Oppo attempts to fix the headroom issue and then fails to do math. ...and fails to verify their work using "Interstellar", one of the most well-renowned soundtracks of the last year. I'm not much of a videophile geek, so I have no idea how to verify their competence on the video side. But from what I'm seeing here, I certainly don't buy into the Oppo hype at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shredhead Posted August 23, 2015 Author Report Share Posted August 23, 2015 It looks like they added 2.79dB of headroom to the bass management in order for the center channel's low frequency to add with the LFE's and not distort. I have no idea where they would have gotten that number. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SME Posted August 23, 2015 Report Share Posted August 23, 2015 I'm not sure either. I'd think one would only need 2.34 dB more, but perhaps their taking into account a WCS with LFE/HPF and/or crossovers filters applied or something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxmercy Posted August 24, 2015 Report Share Posted August 24, 2015 For being a flagship product, those are not flagship results, but at least they gave the problem lip service. Anyone on the other forums talking about this (seeing as the fanboys thought it was just fine as it was)? JSS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shredhead Posted August 25, 2015 Author Report Share Posted August 25, 2015 Haven't gotten a chance to see about that but my guess is that they are bowing down to the statues they made of the logo and burning anyone alive who might bring up that blatant contradiction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeastAudio Posted August 26, 2015 Report Share Posted August 26, 2015 Shred, have you tried any other players, like the decent denon and marantz offerings with analog out's on them yet? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shredhead Posted August 26, 2015 Author Report Share Posted August 26, 2015 It's been a while since I looked into the 7.1 analog out player option. The last I looked, I found a Sherwood I think it was that played everything the OPPO did, only it had different DACs. It had the exact same interface as the OPPO in the menu. The Marantz, Denon, Pioneer and Sony options I saw as SACD players/bluray only had 2 analog outs. I haven't looked into it for a while since all of the Atmos stuff started coming out. Now I just have no idea what's worth getting. More money going into more channels is no doubt going to cheapen the rest of the components in an AVR and I don't think I will ever trust that a piece will do as advertised again so I'm open to suggestions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coolrda Posted August 27, 2015 Report Share Posted August 27, 2015 Nice job Shred and Max. The fact that my 93 audio drops out with Atmos ST's, even though I'm only 7.1 at this time, is an irritant. Even though this problem doesn't effect me because I HDMI everything its still unacceptable. As I was about to place an order for a 103D, I'm now also looking at the Marantz 5007/7007. I've heard their a step up audiowise. Too bad as they have stellar Vid performance, or has that changed as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeastAudio Posted August 27, 2015 Report Share Posted August 27, 2015 ^^^ Those were the exact two units I would have suggested. But still only 2 ch analog out Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aj72 Posted September 3, 2015 Report Share Posted September 3, 2015 Sorry guys just a little confused here. These results are a product of watching Interstellar and Earth to Echo scenes with one or more channels of redirected bass (set to small) via the 7.1 analog multichannel outs right? Quite incredible results for such a lauded P.O.S. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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