ARCAM AVP-700 vs Onkyo 901

Holydoc

Well I promised everyone that I would give a review of the ARCAM AVP-700 Pre/pro against the Onkyo TX-NR901 receiver. Just to update everyone that has not read my previous posts of trying to get an ARCAM to review, I was able to find a dealer that let me borrow an ARCAM AVP-700 for a test run. Since his store is a considerable distance from my house, he even offered to meet me half way and thus the hand-off happened in a Publix parking lot.

To let you know a bit about me and my listening habits, I am a HT buff. HT is about 80% of my listening habits while 20% is dedicated to 2-channel listening. I am in no way claiming to be an audiophile, but I do like listening to music of all kinds. The reasoning I wanted to do this comparison is not because I am disastisfied with my current set-up, but because I keep reading how much better it can be and thus I get the itch (I know many of you can understand this "upgraditis"). So since I had some spare change in my pocket (ahem!) and the dealer was going to give me $500 off of his demo unit, I decided to give it a spin.

Let me start out by saying that I am not claiming my ears can ear all the nuances of the difference in sound when doing this comparison. My ears are good enough to distinguish when the resistance of a speaker cable is too great and causing a speaker to sound "tinny" but that is as far as I can go.

Now let me introduce the players....

Holydoc

This thread is dedicated to pictures of the systems I tested. First let me show you my current system. BTW.. both the Onkyo and the ARCAM were used as pre/pros. I used the Onkyo's pre-outs to attach to an OUTLAW 770 (7x200watt) amp. The ARCAM utilized this same amp.

This is my Onkyo TX-NR901 in its cabinet



This is the transport I used for 2-channel testing. Let me emphasize I only used this as a transport with optical audio feed. I wanted to test the DACs of the ARCAM vs Onkyo.



These is one of my RTi12's that I used for 2-channel listening. The nice thing about the RTi12's is that they are a nice full range speaker.



Now for pictures of the ARCAM AVP-700

The front of this animal:



The Side...



And a rear View...



Finally I selected various CD's to test the 2-channel sound with. Here is a picture of them:



The music included Gospel (cut at a local soundstage), Enya, Hugo, Soundtracks, RAP, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Herb Albert, Sade, and Loreena McKennitt.

The next part will be my first impressions...

Holydoc

These are my first impressions of the ARCAM after bringing it home and removing it from the box.

The first thing you notice right away is that this system is much lighter than any receiver I have ever owned. You forget how much weight the amplification adds to a system. The ARCAM is also shorter than all my receivers.

The manual that comes with the ARCAM is fairly brief. It is thick but that is because it is translated to every known language of the planet (exaggeration!) in its cover. The actual English translated portion is very short. I would almost say it is too short since you have a few unanswered questions when reading it. As opposed to the Onkyo manual that is probably 4 times as thick and answers everything you ever wanted to know is great detail.

The next thing that is obvious is that the front of the ARCAM only has jacks for a set of headphones and an auxiliary unit such as an IPod. This part was not as appealing for me since I constantly use the front of my Onkyo to hook-up gaming systems and video cameras. This may be a bit of a minus when the final decision comes around.

The back of the unit has both balanced and unbalanced outputs. There are also rca inputs for DVD-A 5.1 channels. You will also notice that there are HDMI 1.0 inputs and outputs. Otherwise there are actually less connections on the back of the ARCAM than on my Onkyo for video sources. Though I can fit all my current hook-ups on the ARCAM, it is going to give me very little room to grow. This however may not be too big a minus unless I discover that my games or video camera has no more room on the ARCAM to hook up. I will not know this until I start hooking everything up.

The other very noticeable item about the ARCAM is the cooling system. If you notice in the pictures, the only vents seem to be on the sides of the ARCAM. Here I was surprised again because I am use to the mesh tops of the receivers with the fans a blazing to keep those things cool. I will judge later if this is a problem or not.

Remote is backlit and very nice to style wise. However this is of little importance to me since if I decide to keep this Pro, my HT remote will be used and this one placed in my remote collection drawer.

Let's turn on the unit and hook her up!...

Holydoc

Note: Though I am a HT buff, I tested the ARCAM in 2-channel mode first. The reason was not because I understand that nuiances of music and 2-channel will show that better. The reasoning is because I am lazy and swapping the source and 2 speaker wires is much easier and faster than swapping out 7 speaker wires! So, you will have to wait for HT test.

Setting the ARCAM up for 2 channel mode connection wise was pretty straight forward. I will leave out the gory details since everyone knows how to plug in a socket and move interconnects from one system to the other...

Turning on the unit, puts it into an initialization mode. It goes through a series of self-startups before giving you the controls. It lights up a nice green which can be dimmed if desired. All information about the source and volume is displayed on the matrix display as well as my television connected with component video connections.

The main menu for the unit is entered by pressing and holding the menu button on the remote. This menu allows you to adjust Max Volume, Max on Volume, OSD settings, speaker configurations, subwoofer crossover settings, speaker level settings for calibration, surround EX settings, Speaker bass and treble, video settings, reconfigure buttons on unit, analogue sensitivity, zone 2, and HDMI settings. Lots of tweaks and lots of fun stuff to play with. Though it has more speaker tweaks than my Onkyo (i.e., you can set separate bass and treble settings for each individual speaker), it is minimal in the realm of convenience items. What I mean is that I can set my Onkyo volume to display either absolute or analogue so that I can callibrate at zero settings or use a decibel display instead. The ARCAM only has a decibel display so zero is no sound and 100db is max volume. Not a real minus since those items are just "nice-to-haves". I was disappointed that the ARCAM bass management is exactly like the Onkyo's. I was hoping to be able to set different cross-overs for different speakers.

So I went to the Speaker configuration area and set-up the ARCAM to have Left and Right front speakers set to Large. I also told it that there were no other speakers attached. Placed in their distances from the listening position in feet (you could also use metrics or time delay if you preferred) and went to calibrating. Of course I will modify this later when I set it up for HT.

The final step was to calibrate the system so that I could compare it directly with the Onkyo. The calibration area is exactly like the Onkyo in the fact that you have to manually calibrate. No mikes here! Reading the manual, it states to select each speaker in the menu and a pink noise will be produced that you should calibrate to 75db. Woo hoo! The first bit of noise is about to come out of the ARCAM.

I selected the FR speaker and a whisper of pink noise came out. I say a whisper because with the adjustments set to zero, the pink noise was only about 50db lound. Turning up the adjustment to max (+10) the pink noise barely reached 60db. I tried the other speaker. The same thing! My first thought was that I had hooked things up wrong or had loosened a cable. I checked everything to ensure it was ok. I even swapped back the cables to my Onkyo to make sure I had not inadvertently damaged the amp. Everything worked great. I rehooked up the ARCAM, shut it off and back on, unplugged it, and still the same result. Time to call the dealer.

To make a long story short, the dealer was clueless but would contact ARCAM to find out. The ARCAM website is nothing more than an advertisement for their products with no technical support. But... the AVS forum had a dedicated section to the UK ARCAM members and it was there that I discovered it was a known bug with the units. There had been 7 firmware updates that improved but did not fix this bug.

The good news is that this bug is only with the testtones and does not affect the overall output or sound of the ARCAM. The dealer promptly sent me the firmware updates via email (have not installed yet since it does not affect any of my planned testing and is not stated to have fixed this annoyance). So I used my testtone CD (don't have the DVD hooked up to the ARCAM yet since was using the CD player as the transport) and calibrated the two speakers hooked up to the ARCAM to +-1db of the Onkyo.

Now time to do some listening and comparing...

Holydoc

This was more difficult than I had anticipated. With two systems calibrated to +-1db of each other and adding in the time to swap out speaker and source interconnects, I started to realize how quickly your auditory memory fades.

My first impression was "song playing on Onkyo". Swap speaker and source. "Same song playing on ARCAM". Uggh!

So a new plan was in order. Since I could not hook up both the speakers and the source to a switcher box (at least in the time I have to compare these units) I decided to listen to pieces I was extremely familiar with on the Onkyo and then play that same piece in its entirety on the ARCAM to see if I could detect any differences. This, and I am bragging, worked great! I basically taught myself to listen for differences, parts of the composition I had not noticed before.

So I shut the lights out and sat with my eyes closed listening to Eric Clapton on my Onkyo. As always I enjoyed the piece immensely. Then I swapped connections and did the same with the ARCAM. As I was listening with the ARCAM, I noticed that I could hear his fingers scrape the strings at times. I noticed that the sound of the cymbol being tapped sounded like a drum stick tapping it and not just like a cymbol sound. Then I heard a very prominent string slap. I swapped the cables back and listened again with my Onkyo. Now that I knew where the sounds were suppose to be, I was able to hear them on the Onkyo. The difference is that I had to struggle to hear them. They were not prominent and separated.

Now I understand what everyone means by a muddy sound. It is not that you were not hearing these things before. It is the fact that the sound was so flat and mixed together that you could not discern one element from the next. This is where the ARCAM began to open my ears.

I went through CD after CD with the same conclusions. The ARCAM allowed me to hear other things happening within the music. The small xylophone in the background, or the beat of bongos (rather than just some drum) to the beat. All those sounds were there on the Onkyo but were not separated or pronounced enough to discern them. Only after listening to the ARCAM could I pick out the sounds on the Onkyo but not enjoy them.

I knew this was a different beast when it came to 2-channel music when I found myself just laying in the dark listening to music and smiling when a new guitar rip, piano note, or saxophone sound chirped out from where I had never heard it before.

On a bad note, I was also able to tell when a poor recording was done. Hissing in the background, or popping in the recording became irritating at best. With the Onkyo, I could listen without it bothering me or even knowing. With the ARCAM, it was apparent and teeth gnashing. I am not sure if this is a good point or bad. Means I will have to replace my poorly mastered CDs for better!

Finally a word about the soundstage. The ARCAM does something with 2-channel music that seems to encompass the sound around the listener. While listening to the ARCAM, I went to the source to switch to the next test CD. While I was sitting infront of the source between the two speakers, my mind actually gave me the strange idea that I had connected the center speaker to the ARCAM. All the sound was perfectly balanced right on me, and I was sitting in front of the center speaker. I even went as far as feeling the cones of the center and checking the rear of the ARCAM to make sure I had not been possessed by an alien (joke...I kid!) and had hooked up the center. No matter if I was at the front of the room or 9' in my sitting position, the soundstage was awesome and all around me. With the Onkyo, you knew you were listening to sound coming from 2 speakers. Odd, I know. But just thought I would mention it.

Conclusion: Hands down, the ARCAM is in a totally different league than the Onkyo for 2-channel listening. It is clear, precise, and a pleasure to listen to in 2-channel. All instruments are heard as separate entities. The clarity of the sound is just amazing.

I was impressed with the 2-channel presentation. However you must remember for me it is the HT presentation that will make or break this system. So I am off to devise a test that will adequately compare these two systems. More later....

Holydoc

Well the Home Theatre test came out a bit differently than I predicted. The ARCAM did a very good job of portraying the sound field in a tight and precise manner. The only problem with doing this is that for Home Theatre, you can get too tight. In other words, my Onkyo seemed to have more punch and what I am going to call "umph". For instance a car crash with the ARCAM sounds like metal crinkling and fuel flaming up. For the Onkyo the car metal crunches and the fuel explodes. The Onkyo literally pushes you back in your seat and thumps your chest. The ARCAM just conveys the action. For excitement and becoming encompassed into a movie, "umph" is where it is at.

So in conclusion for 2-channel music, I have never heard my speakers sound so clear and precise with the ARCAM. For Home Theatre useage, the ARCAM does not deliver the punch that the Onkyo does for that low hitting "in your face" action.

Because I use my system mostly for HT purposes, I reluctantly contacted the dealer to make arrangements to return the ARCAM. I wish I had more room so that I could build a dedicated 2-channel rig. I cannot believe anyone would even be slightly disappointed in the "musical" ability of this preamp.

cfrizz

Outstanding write up! So now what, Do you go looking for other preamps to find one that will give you what you want for both music & HT?

Holydoc

cfrizz wrote:

Outstanding write up! So now what, Do you go looking for other prepros to find one that will give you what you want for both music & HT?

Cathy, that is an excellent question. After rejecting the ARCAM, I think I am going to shy away from any more preamps for the time being. I sincerely believe that with my current setup, I will not find a significant upgrade by changing out receivers or preamps in this price range (notice I said with my current setup). Therefore I am going to consider transports and maybe speakers (again) in the future.

Since Panasonic is suppose to finally start distribution of the 50"600U plasma series in the US in June, I will probably be working on how to make this TV look its sharpest. I am excited about getting it.

I-SIG

nevermind.

Wes

Schris22

Nice little read. Good job doing in home auditions. Well If you change your mind about the preamp then try Anthem's I like them for both, but more movies than music. I am 50 50, but it's impressive for movies.

TV eh! so many movies and no front projection? Looks like those RTI12's are pretty constrained in their position. I'm guessing no where else to put them?

Anyway GOod luck with everything,

Chris

Holydoc

Schris22 wrote:

Nice little read. Good job doing in home auditions. Well If you change your mind about the preamp then try Anthem's I like them for both, but more movies than music. I am 50 50, but it's impressive for movies.

TV eh! so many movies and no front projection? Looks like those RTI12's are pretty constrained in their position. I'm guessing no where else to put them?

Anyway GOod luck with everything,

Chris

Which Anthem are you referring to? I have looked at a few up to the D2. Quite a jump in price.

Front Projection does not work in that room since it is bordered by the kitchen, dining area and has a 7' sliding glass door to the Florida Room. All these areas are constantly frequented by family and friends. Plasma should give the best overall picture while not being affected by lights from the other rooms.

RTi12's are constrained? What do you mean? Their positioning is fairly limited but I can do some adjustments if needed. What type of constraints are you seeing and what are the negative affects of that? What are your suggestions on positioning and why?

Thanks for your comments.

Schris22

Aww family room. Yeah plasmas are good in high ambient light sitiuations. Don't forget the high cost of mounting as well if thats your route and factor installation as well.

I've been listening to the D2. I frequent his store at least twice a week and I think it's a great pre for movies. It just depends on how much video you want to run through it. I can talk to him again, but I believe that if you aren't concerened with running video through it then you can go to the D1. He also told me that a new pre is coming out which is suppose to add later editions of HDMI and some other goodies, though I'm unclear about the specifics.

Well about the RTI12's, the one on the right looks like it's almost against a brick wall and the back wall. These are bass heavy players of course but I don't think they would need that much reinforcement. I would try bringing them out from both the side wall and the back wall at least a foot. Thats what I would see as min. because I'm not sure if you can do more than that in your situation. Almost the same with the left RTI12, being so close to the wall will add Db to bass but can also muddy or color the sound of that bass. Your SVS should be able to reach low and take care of DB's if neccessary.

Add some more pictures of the room and maybe I can add better advice.

Good luck and see if you notice a difference.

Chris

Holydoc

Schris22 wrote:

Aww family room. Yeah plasmas are good in high ambient light sitiuations. Don't forget the high cost of mounting as well if thats your route and factor installation as well.

I've been listening to the D2. I frequent his store at least twice a week and I think it's a great pre for movies. It just depends on how much video you want to run through it. I can talk to him again, but I believe that if you aren't concerned with running video through it then you can go to the D1. He also told me that a new pre is coming out which is suppose to add later editions of HDMI and some other goodies, though I'm unclear about the specifics.

Well about the RTI12's, the one on the right looks like it's almost against a brick wall and the back wall. These are bass heavy players of course but I don't think they would need that much reinforcement. I would try bringing them out from both the side wall and the back wall at least a foot. Thats what I would see as min. because I'm not sure if you can do more than that in your situation. Almost the same with the left RTI12, being so close to the wall will add Db to bass but can also muddy or color the sound of that bass. Your SVS should be able to reach low and take care of DB's if neccessary.

Add some more pictures of the room and maybe I can add better advice.

Good luck and see if you notice a difference.

Chris

Chris,

Thanks for all the advice. Let me apologize right off for my terrible photography work. The pictures are very misleading when it comes to the different aspects in the room.

The right RTi is 20 inches from the brick wall and 10 inches from the backwall. Matter of fact, the PB-12/Plus is between it and the brick wall. The left RTi is 10 inches from the backwall. Excellent recommendations that I would of took had my system not already been configured as such. Again I apologize for the bad perspective shot.

The Plasma will not need to be mounted. It comes with its own pedestal stand and will fit perfectly on my custom built credenza. I had it built especially to house my equipment for this plasma.

The preamp has to be well equipped to handle video switching. I currently use my receiver to handle all video swapping of my DVR, DVD, VHS, IPod, and Camcorder. Only one cable will travel to my plasma to be used strictly as a monitor.

Again thanks for the "dead-on" advice! I do apologize that the photos misled you.