Multichannel madness

[admin_exported]

Why are most home cinema amps and receivers so complicated to set up? Surely the manufacturers could design surround sound amps that automatically set themselves up at the touch of a button. After all, they can do it with TVs.

 

[Andrew Everard]

[quote user="kiddo"]Surely the manufacturers could design surround sound amps that automatically set themselves up at the touch of a button.[/quote]

They do, lots of them. You just plug in the microphone provided, push a button, and leave the receiver to do its thang. Within a couple of minutes, or at worst ten, you have speaker levels, distances, and equalisation settings in place, ready for listening. If you've connected up the speakers incorrectly, it'll even tell you where you've gone wrong.

And it needn't cost you a fortune - Onkyo's TX-SR505 does all this for just £250, and Sony's new STR-DG510 for well under £200.

 

[Anonymous]

Bear in mind that most people take a product out of the box, plug it in and that's that. If an auto set-up can get you most of the way to setting up your receiver properly, it's got to be worth doing. Anyone with a sound-pressure meter isn't going to entrust set-up to an auto system anyway.