Pioneer SC-05 == happy dance in my pants
quadzilla
Posts: 1,543
Disclaimers: Most of my previous experience with sound is live sound. I'm only starting to learn how much I don't know about getting quality sound out of a system. I've been into the home theater thing about a whopping 6-7 weeks now, so keep all that in mind during this review. Also keep in mind that it's likely that nearly everything I say will be wrong at some level or other, and that I'm doing this 'cause, well, dems da rules. That said, let the reviewing begin...
As I said, most of my previous experience is with live sound, where loud is the only real quantifier. I do, however, like to think that I was not entirely clueless, as at least when I did the mix, you could hear something besides drums and vocals. I did have one fairly nice system once before, and most of my comparison will be to that. That consisted of a Bose (don't say it) 250 wpc power amp that weighed around 80 lbs, and had a transformer nearly as big as my head. That was fed with an SAE preamp. I also had a few other bits and bobs, the makes and models of which escape me, as all this was nearly 20 years ago. The amp was plugged into a pair of Sansuis that I can't remember the model of, but they had an 18" woofer, 8" midbass driver, mid, tweet, and supertweet. They were huge, and they were loud. And at the time, I thought they sounded mighty fine. In the intervening time, I've had only a very basic system; an HK AVR 20II feeding a pair of Sansui SP-2000s that my TV and a Denon CD player were plugged into.
However, due to a fire at my old house a while back, once we got moved into the new place, I had the opportunity to do a full-on HT set up (with wifely approval for the full treatment, including bringing my much beloved turntable out of storage), and that I did.
I ended up choosing the Pioneer SC-05 over the SC-07 and 09 since I knew I wouldn't be able to get the benefits that that 09 could provide, and the output side of the 05 and 07 seemed identical, as well as sounding identical in the testing I could do. I also didn't see much benefit (at the time) for the upgraded up-sampling of analog. I'd also considered Yamaha, HK, and a few others, but decided that the SC-05 was the best quality at the best price point that I could find. More on that later.
The system as it exists today is as close as I can get to my ideal, at least until I can afford to start buying monoblock tube amps and upgrade to the LSi series. Details on the audio section are in my .sig, and I'm very, very happy with the set up, which has evolved rapidly (and rather expensively) over the last 6 weeks since I started this little journey.
The SC-05 is in a simple audio rack, and using GLS bananas at each end of some 14 ga. low oxygen fine stranded generic cable to all speakers. I'm using AR interconnects and sub cables for the the other duties, and will probably upgrade the generic HDMI cables with some from Blue Jeans cables at some point, once I get everything into a final configuration, as the whole system is still very much in the "tweak-test-tweak" phase. The DVD/SACD/DVDA is connected via component video and optical out into the receiver, so this allowed me to test the receiver's video upscaling. The PS3 is connected via HDMI, as is my Time Warner 6416 DVR. The cassette deck and turntable are connected to their respective analog inputs on the receiver.
I listen to a variety of stuff, nearly everything except show tunes, country and rap. For video, I tend towards action flicks, although I also like anything with a good story (i.e.; A Beautiful Mind, Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, etc.).
The very first thing I did was to run the the audio calibration. The first pass, I let it do a full auto. Afterwards, I found the the bass tended to be somewhat boomy. I again ran it, this time choosing auto, and set the THX to yes per a recommendation I'd read, which caused all the speakers to be set to "small". After that, I found the bass to sound much better, with most of the boominess gone. I did some tweaking on the sub placement, and that got rid of the rest of the problem with the bass. That done, I started in on some serious listening tests.
So for my first tests, I pulled out Mighty Mighty Bosstones' Let's Face It (perhaps the greatest album ever made, certainly one of the best). I found the level of detail and air extraordinary on my setup. The punch from the horns, the growling vocals, the way the kick drum resonated, it was like nothing I'd heard in my house before. Next I moved on to the Chili Pepper's Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The bass lines put out by Flea were never so detailed on any setup I've heard that album on, and the guitars and vocals sound like they're almost in the room with me. In this, my old SAE/Bose/Sansui did have a slight edge, but only between -15 and -10. At the time, I lived in a pier-and-beam house, and at that volume level, and only at that volume level, the way the speakers were coupled to the floor, the resonances, etc., all came together to cause the imaging to exceed anything I've heard before or since. The musicians literally sounded as though they were set up in my living room, with guitars and vocals especially seeming to float in the air right in front of me. However, given how close I am with this set up, I think I can bring that back again, once I rebuild the xovers in all the speakers. I find the imaging and soundstage to be very good in this setup, so close I can taste perfection. I then flipped over to the digital classical channel from Time Warner, and ended up spending the rest of the day just sitting there in an ecstasy of musical greatness. The soundstage was quite large, and I again heard so much that I'd never heard before in the pieces that were played. It all sort of blended together in a sort of sonic sublimeness that left me blown away by what my first attempt at a real HT set up could do. Anyway, moving on...
I decided on, what else, the Matrix Trilogy for my first test of the DVD upscaling in the AVR. Compared to the scaling on the PS3, the SC-05 shows a tad less in the way of scaling artifacts. And considering that I see very little in the way of artifacts from the PS3, the SC-05 is even better. Next, I picked up a copy of Dark Knight on Blu-Ray to do a side by side of the DVD copy of Dark Knight I already had. The DVD copy played through the 49A again looked very good using the internal scaling. But the Blu-Ray was noticeably better, with much more of a film-like quality, and there was no comparison in the audio. An uncompressed 7.1 soundtrack beats a compressed 5.1 soundtrack any day. And on the Blu-Ray, explosions literally shook my innards, whereas the DVD merely sounded really great through the SC-05 (I find it strange to say something sounded "merely great", but that's the closest I can get to a description of my reaction). Next, I put in the latest Punisher. Again, the 7.1 sound was quite amazing, and a couple of times I jumped at the sounds coming from behind me. I'm definitely not used to a quality multi-channel surround sound set up. And this is very much a quality set up. The HDMI pass-through created absolutely no artifacts that I can detect, which I tested by plugging the PS3 directly into the HDMI input on the TV, and then back into the SC-05. In both cases, the picture was very clean and detailed on my Samsung LN52A580P6F
As a final test, I put on the Rainbow Bridge sound track, which I happen to possess as an original vinyl pressing. Playing on my unmodified Pioneer PL-518 with the RXP3 rat shack cartridge, the sound was incredibly warm and rich and detailed. I am now in love with vinyl again, after having had my turntable and albums in storage for the last 10+ years (note: the down side of having a wife is that they sometimes refuse to let you do perfectly reasonable things, like putting a table next to her handmade customer entertainment center to set your turntable on when there's no where to put it in the center itself). And this is the only thing that caused me to question my choice in any way. I earlier said I decided to pass on the SC-07, which is supposed to contain an upgraded digital upsampler for converting analog and 16 bit digital to a 24/96 sample before processing. However, if the SC-07 does sound better in this regard, I'm not sure my pants would be able to withstand the effects.
So, in summary, I find the highs to be very clean and accurate without being cold or harsh, the bass is deep and tight, with perhaps just a bit of warmth, but definitely not excessively colored. Mids have a great deal of punch and detail. So I love my SC-05. For the cost, I don't see how I could have gotten a bigger bang out of the duckets I dropped for this. Especially given that I picked it up new on eBay from an authorized Pioneer dealer for 795 shipped. If someone can show me a better deal, please do. Meanwhile, the happy dance in my pants shall continue indefinitely.
As I said, most of my previous experience is with live sound, where loud is the only real quantifier. I do, however, like to think that I was not entirely clueless, as at least when I did the mix, you could hear something besides drums and vocals. I did have one fairly nice system once before, and most of my comparison will be to that. That consisted of a Bose (don't say it) 250 wpc power amp that weighed around 80 lbs, and had a transformer nearly as big as my head. That was fed with an SAE preamp. I also had a few other bits and bobs, the makes and models of which escape me, as all this was nearly 20 years ago. The amp was plugged into a pair of Sansuis that I can't remember the model of, but they had an 18" woofer, 8" midbass driver, mid, tweet, and supertweet. They were huge, and they were loud. And at the time, I thought they sounded mighty fine. In the intervening time, I've had only a very basic system; an HK AVR 20II feeding a pair of Sansui SP-2000s that my TV and a Denon CD player were plugged into.
However, due to a fire at my old house a while back, once we got moved into the new place, I had the opportunity to do a full-on HT set up (with wifely approval for the full treatment, including bringing my much beloved turntable out of storage), and that I did.
I ended up choosing the Pioneer SC-05 over the SC-07 and 09 since I knew I wouldn't be able to get the benefits that that 09 could provide, and the output side of the 05 and 07 seemed identical, as well as sounding identical in the testing I could do. I also didn't see much benefit (at the time) for the upgraded up-sampling of analog. I'd also considered Yamaha, HK, and a few others, but decided that the SC-05 was the best quality at the best price point that I could find. More on that later.
The system as it exists today is as close as I can get to my ideal, at least until I can afford to start buying monoblock tube amps and upgrade to the LSi series. Details on the audio section are in my .sig, and I'm very, very happy with the set up, which has evolved rapidly (and rather expensively) over the last 6 weeks since I started this little journey.
The SC-05 is in a simple audio rack, and using GLS bananas at each end of some 14 ga. low oxygen fine stranded generic cable to all speakers. I'm using AR interconnects and sub cables for the the other duties, and will probably upgrade the generic HDMI cables with some from Blue Jeans cables at some point, once I get everything into a final configuration, as the whole system is still very much in the "tweak-test-tweak" phase. The DVD/SACD/DVDA is connected via component video and optical out into the receiver, so this allowed me to test the receiver's video upscaling. The PS3 is connected via HDMI, as is my Time Warner 6416 DVR. The cassette deck and turntable are connected to their respective analog inputs on the receiver.
I listen to a variety of stuff, nearly everything except show tunes, country and rap. For video, I tend towards action flicks, although I also like anything with a good story (i.e.; A Beautiful Mind, Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, etc.).
The very first thing I did was to run the the audio calibration. The first pass, I let it do a full auto. Afterwards, I found the the bass tended to be somewhat boomy. I again ran it, this time choosing auto, and set the THX to yes per a recommendation I'd read, which caused all the speakers to be set to "small". After that, I found the bass to sound much better, with most of the boominess gone. I did some tweaking on the sub placement, and that got rid of the rest of the problem with the bass. That done, I started in on some serious listening tests.
So for my first tests, I pulled out Mighty Mighty Bosstones' Let's Face It (perhaps the greatest album ever made, certainly one of the best). I found the level of detail and air extraordinary on my setup. The punch from the horns, the growling vocals, the way the kick drum resonated, it was like nothing I'd heard in my house before. Next I moved on to the Chili Pepper's Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The bass lines put out by Flea were never so detailed on any setup I've heard that album on, and the guitars and vocals sound like they're almost in the room with me. In this, my old SAE/Bose/Sansui did have a slight edge, but only between -15 and -10. At the time, I lived in a pier-and-beam house, and at that volume level, and only at that volume level, the way the speakers were coupled to the floor, the resonances, etc., all came together to cause the imaging to exceed anything I've heard before or since. The musicians literally sounded as though they were set up in my living room, with guitars and vocals especially seeming to float in the air right in front of me. However, given how close I am with this set up, I think I can bring that back again, once I rebuild the xovers in all the speakers. I find the imaging and soundstage to be very good in this setup, so close I can taste perfection. I then flipped over to the digital classical channel from Time Warner, and ended up spending the rest of the day just sitting there in an ecstasy of musical greatness. The soundstage was quite large, and I again heard so much that I'd never heard before in the pieces that were played. It all sort of blended together in a sort of sonic sublimeness that left me blown away by what my first attempt at a real HT set up could do. Anyway, moving on...
I decided on, what else, the Matrix Trilogy for my first test of the DVD upscaling in the AVR. Compared to the scaling on the PS3, the SC-05 shows a tad less in the way of scaling artifacts. And considering that I see very little in the way of artifacts from the PS3, the SC-05 is even better. Next, I picked up a copy of Dark Knight on Blu-Ray to do a side by side of the DVD copy of Dark Knight I already had. The DVD copy played through the 49A again looked very good using the internal scaling. But the Blu-Ray was noticeably better, with much more of a film-like quality, and there was no comparison in the audio. An uncompressed 7.1 soundtrack beats a compressed 5.1 soundtrack any day. And on the Blu-Ray, explosions literally shook my innards, whereas the DVD merely sounded really great through the SC-05 (I find it strange to say something sounded "merely great", but that's the closest I can get to a description of my reaction). Next, I put in the latest Punisher. Again, the 7.1 sound was quite amazing, and a couple of times I jumped at the sounds coming from behind me. I'm definitely not used to a quality multi-channel surround sound set up. And this is very much a quality set up. The HDMI pass-through created absolutely no artifacts that I can detect, which I tested by plugging the PS3 directly into the HDMI input on the TV, and then back into the SC-05. In both cases, the picture was very clean and detailed on my Samsung LN52A580P6F
As a final test, I put on the Rainbow Bridge sound track, which I happen to possess as an original vinyl pressing. Playing on my unmodified Pioneer PL-518 with the RXP3 rat shack cartridge, the sound was incredibly warm and rich and detailed. I am now in love with vinyl again, after having had my turntable and albums in storage for the last 10+ years (note: the down side of having a wife is that they sometimes refuse to let you do perfectly reasonable things, like putting a table next to her handmade customer entertainment center to set your turntable on when there's no where to put it in the center itself). And this is the only thing that caused me to question my choice in any way. I earlier said I decided to pass on the SC-07, which is supposed to contain an upgraded digital upsampler for converting analog and 16 bit digital to a 24/96 sample before processing. However, if the SC-07 does sound better in this regard, I'm not sure my pants would be able to withstand the effects.
So, in summary, I find the highs to be very clean and accurate without being cold or harsh, the bass is deep and tight, with perhaps just a bit of warmth, but definitely not excessively colored. Mids have a great deal of punch and detail. So I love my SC-05. For the cost, I don't see how I could have gotten a bigger bang out of the duckets I dropped for this. Especially given that I picked it up new on eBay from an authorized Pioneer dealer for 795 shipped. If someone can show me a better deal, please do. Meanwhile, the happy dance in my pants shall continue indefinitely.
Turntable: Empire 208
Arm: Rega 300
Cart: Shelter 501 III
Phono Pre: dsachs consulting
Digital: Marantz SACD 30n
Pre: Conrad Johnson ET3 SE
Amp: Conrad Johnson Premier 350
Cables: Cardas Neutral Reference
Speakers: SDA 2.3TL, heavily modified
Arm: Rega 300
Cart: Shelter 501 III
Phono Pre: dsachs consulting
Digital: Marantz SACD 30n
Pre: Conrad Johnson ET3 SE
Amp: Conrad Johnson Premier 350
Cables: Cardas Neutral Reference
Speakers: SDA 2.3TL, heavily modified
Post edited by quadzilla on
Comments
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Fantastic review! I just have one big problem with it.....it makes me want one of those amps!
____________________________________________________________
polkaudio Fully Modded SDA SRS 1.2TLs + Dreadnaught, LSiM706c, 4 X Polk Surrounds + 4 X ATMOS, SVS PB13 Ultra X 2, Pass Labs X1, Marantz 7704, Bob Carver Crimson Beauty 350 Tube Mono Blocks, Carver Sunfire Signature Cinema Grande 400x5, ADCOM GFA 7807, Panasonic UB420, Moon 380D DAC, EPSON Pro Cinema 6050 -
quadzilla, regarding your purchase on "eBay from an authorized Pioneer dealer for 795 shipped". can you share the name of that seller as I am interested in purchasing one?
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http://www.hifiheaven.net/Home_Audio/Home_Theater_Audio/HT_Receivers/Elite_Surround/elite_surround.html
I don't see a'gon ad. If you call hifiH, they wud be able to honor u the 699 for SC-05
Living Room: 7.3: Samsung - LN52A750, Pioneer Elite SC07, logitech 880
Def Tech Mythos ST
Fronts, Def Tech Mythos 10 Center, Def Tech BP-30 Surr, Def Tech Mythos GemXL SurrBack, MartinLogan Dynamo
2Ch: Carver TL-3200 CD player, Carver CT-17 pre, Carver TFM-45 amp driving SDA-1C
Bed Room: Pioneer Elite VSX-52 , Monitor 50
Storage-RTi8,CSi5,PSW505,Monitor50 -
Hey man, Very in-depth and genuine review on your experience with the SC-05, love mine. Appreciate the time you took to break it down. Awesome AVR, yes? I have yet to realize its' full potential after 2 months.
Pat.Receiver: Pioneer Elite SC-05
Amp: Emotiva Xpa-3
Front L/R: POLK Rti-a9s':D
Center:POLK Csi-a6
Rear surround's:POLK Rti-a1s'
Sub: Klipsch Synergy sub-12
Sony Kdl-46w4100 46" LCD
PS3
Audioquest type 4 wiring. -
Excellent. Thanks for the write up. I enjoyed reading it.
DanDan
My personal quest is to save to world of bad audio, one thread at a time. -
Thanks vijayl! I did just that. Got it for 782 shipped and already have a tracking number.
