AV8, even in this mode, its least impressive sounding mode, to competing processors 1 and 2, even in their best sounding direct mode as a simple analog line section, the AV8 still trounced them. Thus, while the digital input path to and through the AV8's signal processing is clearly preferable when you can use it (with digital sources), you can still expect excellent sound when you are confined to using the AV8's signal processing with a source having only analog outputs, such as a stereo tuner or a phono front end (Arcam sells an optional phono front end board for the AV8, but our review unit did not have this).
      We also found that the slight soft defocus we heard (probably from the A/D convertor) actually had some euphonic benefits. It offset the slight solid state crispness we found in the AV8's direct throughput line section stage, by counteracting this crispness with a subtle softening and sweetness. Thus, on the hardness vs. softness scale, it actually made the AV8 more neutral and musically accurate, and enjoyably relaxing to listen to, even though it did not reveal as much sonic or spatial information as the various other paths through the AV8.
      Incidentally, we found that a good choice of power amplifier could, in a similar manner, very effectively offset the treble crispness we found in the DV27A, and also in all the other higher fidelity paths through the AV8. Arcam themselves make an excellent seven channel power amplifier in this FMJ series, the P7, which you might think would be a natural mate for its remarkably special siblings, the DV27A and AV8. But the P7's sole sonic flaw is also a slight solid state crispness in the lower treble. If you add up this same coloration times three by putting all three units in series, the total amount of this one coloration finally intrudes upon sonic enjoyment. So, we found, it is far better to select a power amplifier whose trebles are sweet and airy rather than crisp, in order to offset rather than exaggerate the slight treble crispness of the DV27A and AV8 - provided it is a transparent power amplifier that is fully revealing of all the sonic virtues of the DV27A and AV8 (you don't want a power amplifier that is soft due to sonic veiling). One excellent example proved to be the McCormack DNA-HT5 power amplifier. Its sweet and airy trebles made the DV27A and AV8 sound even more musically natural, by effectively curing their slight solid state crispness. Amazingly, the McCormack also helped the DV27A and AV8 to be even more transparently revealing of subtle sonic details and of space itself, thus helping these Arcam units to sound even more spectacular.


AV8 Controls

      The AV8, like other high end processors, offers a powerful and flexible array of signal processing options. It can take a while for the user to master the techniques for controlling all these options, with each new processor, because each product takes a different approach to option control.
      Some manufacturers opt for a single master control menu, which must then contain nested levels of submenus. If organized well, this type of menu system can be easier to learn, but it can be more of a nuisance to use after you have mastered it, because you must navigate through nested submenus every time, even when you want to change something simple. Arcam takes the opposite approach in the AV8. The AV8 control system contains a number of distinct and independent menus, each of which are quickly accessible by a separate button on the remote control. It's more daunting to learn this type of control system, because the menus are not self guiding, and because you have to learn which buttons and menus control which options. Also, Arcam's idea of how to logically group options together (in a given menu accessed by a given button) might well not agree with your intuition as to how functions should be logically grouped, so it takes a while to learn in which menu lies buried the adjustment you now want to make. Just be patient and give yourself time (don't try to figure it all out from the owner's manual at the start), and you'll find that you gradually learn everything automatically. Once you learn this product's idiosyncrasies, about which controls are in which menu accessed by which button, the Arcam approach makes it quicker and easier to adjust most control parameters, since you can access the desired menu item with fewer navigation steps.
      Like most processors, the AV8 also makes a lot of control option choices automatically for you. For example, the signal processing options available to you change, to a different prescribed list, depending on the type of incoming program material. This makes things simpler for you by reducing the number of choices you must make for each new type of program source you switch to, or for each new type of disc you insert into the DV27A. But there is still a maze of options to choose from.
      To help guide you through the maze, and help you get the best sounding processing out of the AV8, here's a short list of the mode choices we found most effective. For movies, the THX Ultra 2 mode provides the richest, and usually the most believable, surround enhancement. Remember to fine tune the various loudspeaker delays and levels for each movie (some soundtracks require much more level boost in the surround channels, before their spatial portrayal becomes realistic). Then, after you have established the three most useful templates of delay and level settings for various movies, save them as three of the five available presets of the AV8's Setup Menu, and code all your movies as 1, 2, 3, or custom.
      For enriching the spatial portrayal of two channel stereo material, choose between the two modes we found most useful: Pro Logic II Music and DTS Neo6 Music (your choice will probably vary for each different recording). Pro Logic II Music provides richer ambience, but with slightly vaguer localization specificity, and also a slightly phasey, softer sound quality, even for the front main channels, which might come from matrix subtraction performed in this mode. We achieved best results with Pro Logic II Music mode by setting the Dimension to +3, the Center Width to +3 (just as the manual suggests), and Panorama to On (Main Menu Screen 2). DTS Neo6 Music provides a more articulate, cleaner sound for the stereo performance up front, and better localization in its imaging, but it has much less enrichment of ambience, and thus you need to dial in a much greater boost to side surround and back surround levels with Neo6 Music than you had with Pro Logic II Music. This means that you should store two presets for stereo source enrichment, one that calls up Pro Logic II Music mode with its fine tuned settings for delay and level among all loudspeakers, and the other that calls up DTS Neo6 Music mode with its far different fine tuned settings for delay and level. Then and only then can you meaningfully switch back and forth between these two modes, for each new CD or LP you put on, to decide which mode is better sounding for that recording.
      In our research we also learned a further trick, which puts a wrinkle in the above procedure. In order to get enough surround ambience enrichment out of DTS Neo6 Music to be truly immersed in the alternative space, we had to crank the level of the back surrounds way up, so far up that we started hearing some direct instrumental sounds disconcertingly coming at us from the rear, where they shouldn't be. This created a dilemma for Neo6, which almost caused us to discard it as one of our two favorite modes. Until it suddenly occurred to us that we could make our monopole back surrounds less localizable by connecting them in reverse phase polarity, relative to the side surrounds and the other system loudspeakers (you could also accomplish this by employing dipole loudspeakers for the back surrounds and sitting in their null). This trick indeed worked very well, keeping DTS Neo6 Music in the running as a viable rival to Pro Logic II Music. But of course it's also a nuisance to have to reverse the phase polarity to the back surrounds every time you use DTS Neo6 Music, only to have to switch them back again to normal phase polarity for Pro Logic II Music and for movies.
      The AV8 also provides a rich variety of DSP effects that can be applied to two channel stereo material. The basic sonic fidelity of these effects modes is surprisingly good (far better than similar effects modes in Yamaha products of yore), but still not quite as good as our two favorite stereo enrichment modes above. On the other hand, our favorite two modes above can only extract and dispense to various loudspeakers the ambience that's already encoded in a recording, and they require painstaking fine tuning to extract and dispense this ambience to optimally portray surround space - whereas these DSP effects can quickly and easily add extra reverb that simulates various environments, even if little or no environmental ambience was captured in the original recording. Among the different DSP effects choices, Club and Church add an excellent simulation of room reverb for a fairly large club and for a giant cathedral, respectively, while Sports is effective for simulating a crowded stadium feel from a two channel sports broadcast.
      The Arcam engineers are fully aware that the DV27A and AV8 are superbly revealing, not only of program material, but also of subtle differences occurring within the chassis that might affect the signal path, perhaps even only indirectly. Therefore, they give you the control capability to optimize the sound of the AV8 in various subtle ways. You can turn off the front panel display completely, using the dedicated Display button. This does indeed slightly improve the sound, just as in other truly perfectionist high end audio equipment, and thus proves the AV8's pedigree and status. You can and should then save this "display off" setting within all five AV8 presets that are available via the Setup Menu.
      Incidentally, the preset Save command exists only within the context of the Setup Menu, yet it also saves choices you have made outside this context, within other menus and with other buttons (this "display off" choice is one example). Thus, in order to save an external choice like "display off" within a given preset, you should first exit and then freshly re-engage that numbered preset (chosen via the Main Menu), then exit the Main Menu, then turn the display off using the Display control button, then counter-intuitively enter the Setup Menu (which will temporarily force the display back on, but don't let that confuse you), then go to Save and give the Save command sequence.
      Note also that, whenever you issue the Save command sequence from within the Setup Menu, the AV8 will save within that preset virtually all your settings and choices that happen to be in force at that moment throughout the AV8, including many choices outside the context of the Setup Menu that you would not expect to be saved (or altered with each Save command). So don't ever issue a Save command casually. This is very different from the computer world, where it never hurts to frequently save a document in progress. With the AV8, you must be fully aware of everything you have changed, since freshly entering a new preset, before you issue a new Save command. Thus, after you diddle with adjustments, say to optimize a particular CD or movie, don't ever then hit Save as a reflex action when exiting the Setup Menu, because you will erase all the carefully worked out choices and adjustments you had previously stored in that preset. When you do want to make a deliberate change in a stored preset, it's best to write down all your intended changes, then engage another preset via the Main Menu, then freshly re-engage your chosen preset via the Main Menu, then make the specific changes you have written down, and then enter the Setup Menu to issue the Save command sequence.
      We also improved the AV8's sound slightly by turning off the record outputs. You can do this simply by designating an unused AV8 input as the source for the signal that is sent to the tape output and also the VCR output (Main Menu Screen 2), and then saving this choice under all five presets as well. Why does this improve the sound? The probable reason is that the output buffers for the record outputs impose at their inputs a nonlinear load on the main audio signal line, if they are connected to that line, thereby slightly degrading the sound of the main audio signal line. Connecting the inputs of these output buffers to an unused input disengages them from the main audio line, regardless of what other inputs you are listening to. If you want to use the record outputs temporarily to do some recording, it's easy to temporarily re-engage them. It's only because the DV27A and AV8 are so revealingly transparent that you can hear and appreciate the subtle sonic benefits of disengaging the record output buffers.
      The AV8 allows you to turn off the video input from the DV27A when not needed (it's quickest to do this by selecting an unused video input via Main Menu 1). This too slightly improves the sound, by precluding signal contaminating video currents from running around inside the chassis. Indeed, in our investigative probing we discovered that you can improve the AV8's sound even further by not even connecting any video input cables at all, so that not even video voltages are present in the chassis to contaminate the audio signal. Thus, you would never use the AV8 as a video switching center. Instead, you would send the video from the DV27A directly to your monitor, and route the occasional video OSD output of the AV8 to your monitor's second video input.
      Some might carp that the video shielding and grounding might have been better executed in the AV8, to prevent audio contamination by video signals. But, while that may be true, we would point out that the shoe might well belong on the other foot. It might well be that the video signal contamination is audible in the AV8, perhaps in spite of reasonable shielding, only because the AV8's intrinsic sonics are so transparently revealing of everything, and are so clean and pure. To research this, we tried this same test of video susceptibility for the two competing processors above. We did not hear any sonic improvement when video was removed from them, because the sound of those processors already was intrinsically so veiled or distorted that it masked whether there was video contamination or not. The sound of the AV8 with video contamination was still a lot cleaner and more transparent than the sound of those other processors, regardless of whether video was put through them or not.
      As noted previously, the AV8 sounds better (more transparent and cleaner) when you set all tone controls to flat or zero, since this removes a stage of DSP signal processing from the signal path. We also found other various, random control settings that elicited better sound from these Arcam units, though neither we nor Arcam have a good explanation as to why these controls should make the sonic difference they do, nor why our favored setting should be sonically best.
      For example, for some unknown reason the DV27A elicits slightly better ambience from a recording when its subwoofer crossover frequency (menu 4) is set to the THX standard of 80 Hz, rather than when this control is set to any other frequency, including the immediately adjacent frequencies on either side, 70 Hz and 90 Hz. To set the best sounding high frequency limit for your subwoofer, you can also use either the AV8's control (setup menu 5) or the control on your subwoofer amplifier, while setting the other control at its highest possible frequency to get it out of the way (cascading too many filters in series tends to worsen subwoofer ringing and overhang).
      Likewise, for unknown reasons, spatial ambience is richer and better when you set Pro Logic to Auto (DV27A menu 3), set Priority to DVD-Audio (DV27A menu 1), and set THX Surround EX to Auto (AV8 setup menu 6).
      With the above option choices in place, you can get the very best sound out of the Arcam DV27A and AV8. Your choices for other options will of course depend on the setup of your system.



                   *                    *                    *                   *   
       

      They say that audio reviewers become jaded by hearing so much equipment.
      They are wrong.
      We do have to endure listening to the good, the bad, and the ugly. Once in a while, we find a truly excellent piece of equipment that we can really enjoy. The excellent equipment also keeps our critical skills sharp, for you have to hear the excellent before you can learn to tell the difference between excellent and merely good.
      But these two Arcam units are more than excellent. They have literally transformed our horizons of what home entertainment can be as an experience, and how it can move and affect you. They have literally opened a new dimension of space. And that new dimension, now opened, can never be closed again for us.
      Personally, I have only one regret. I wish I had the time to bring a set of these two Arcam units into each of your listening rooms, and personally do all the fine tuning adjustments needed to get spatial portrayal just right in your room - and thereby share with you the gift of my transforming experience with these units. Once you have experienced space as I have with these Arcam units, you will never want to go back again, to a lesser experience with fewer dimensions.



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