Odd experience at Superfi yesterday

Mr. Sukebe, just out of curiosity, which branch of Superfi was it?

 

It was Camden town branch.
Pleasant enough chap, came across very nicely, just clearly a little odd in the way of advice.

 

I have had similar advice in Audio T. "Just get a Yamaha processor with pre outs, you don't need anything expensive."

I was surprised by this advice I must amit. Especially as they stock some pretty special processors in there.

 

I've been there myself a few times, including a few days ago. Have never been particularly impressed with what they stock.

A shame about the "split"...I hope it's amicable!

Cheers,

Jon

 

dunno?

maybe the guys at superfury have realsed that av is a load of tosh and once the majority of it is being done by a decent two channel system then the rest of it doesn't make much difference. especially once you factor the old , how often to you watch the same film augment

 

thats my argument - I'm more into music, but I like watching folims with a good sound too...

but if my nad drives the main speakers, then how does it matter what AV amp I have..?

 

One possibility is that if the pre-amp section of your AV amp is rubbish, then you'll be throwing rubbish into your main stereo system.

Clearly some of the views above infer that this can be important.

 

yeah, I know what you're saying - but I'm happy with the sound on both counts (music and av) - but using the nad to drive the main speakers whilst watching a dvd is about 20% better than when I mearly had the av amp driving all the speakers...!

well, in my ears anyway

 

A quality surround processor makes a big difference, though it's quite subjective (obviously if you don't really care about how your AV sounds, you won't notice the subtle differences that a home cinema fanatic will gush over).

I've had a Yamaha DSP-E800 plugged into my hifi/AV system for years now. It does the job, but over the years I've become less and less satisfied with it, partly because my sources and preamps have gotten better and better (which of course makes the Yammy sound worse and worse by comparison).

A while back I spent some time with a Meridian 568.2 and a Sony 9000ES (a high-end Sony surround processor). They both sounded very different from the Yammy and from each other, and both the Sony and Meridian were a lot better than the Yam. I was, however, a bit surprised at just what was improved with the high-end procs. The big, noisy action sequences, which are favourites of the AV crowd for demoing and judging performance, didn't sound too much better on the high-end procs. Instead it was generally the more atmospheric scenes, where subtle ambient sounds were much clearer and more involving, and really added to the experience. Surround effects were also steered more smoothly and seemlessly between the speakers. And finally, and this applied particularly to the Meridian, bass was much, much better - cleaner, smoother, much more natural.

Dunc