XGIMI Player
Member
Nine times out of ten when somebody here says their receiver has run out of steam, there is nothing wrong with the receiver. Something in the setup menu is quietly handing the amp a job it was never meant to do, and swapping in more watts just buys a bigger version of the same problem.
The one that catches the most people is the speaker size setting. Leave the mains on Large and the receiver dutifully sends everything below the crossover to speakers that cannot reproduce it, while the sub sits there doing very little. The amp burns headroom on bass that never makes it into the room. Cross them over and hand that work to a powered sub and the same receiver suddenly sounds like it grew a power supply.
The second is the impedance or ohm setting buried in the setup menu. Several brands ship it in a mode that deliberately limits the rails to keep the protection circuit happy with lower impedance loads, and it is set that way out of the box. If your speakers do not need it, it is costing you output for nothing.
After that it is the boring stuff: eco or auto power modes that clip the top end of the dynamic range, a crossover set so low that the mains are still doing subwoofer duty in everything but name, and levels trimmed so far down at calibration that you are running the volume knob near the top of its range to compensate.
None of that costs money to check. What is the worst default any of you have found on a receiver straight out of the box?
The one that catches the most people is the speaker size setting. Leave the mains on Large and the receiver dutifully sends everything below the crossover to speakers that cannot reproduce it, while the sub sits there doing very little. The amp burns headroom on bass that never makes it into the room. Cross them over and hand that work to a powered sub and the same receiver suddenly sounds like it grew a power supply.
The second is the impedance or ohm setting buried in the setup menu. Several brands ship it in a mode that deliberately limits the rails to keep the protection circuit happy with lower impedance loads, and it is set that way out of the box. If your speakers do not need it, it is costing you output for nothing.
After that it is the boring stuff: eco or auto power modes that clip the top end of the dynamic range, a crossover set so low that the mains are still doing subwoofer duty in everything but name, and levels trimmed so far down at calibration that you are running the volume knob near the top of its range to compensate.
None of that costs money to check. What is the worst default any of you have found on a receiver straight out of the box?
