Calibration Tips & Tricks
When you set up your receiver, you want to first set all your distances. Now if you really want to do this right and have subwoofers with digital processing, then you want to increase the distance in your receiver to account for the delay in the subwoofer processor. In this case, the JL Audio processing adds 12 milliseconds of delay which converts to adding 12 feet to the distance. When you tell the processor that the subs are 12 feet farther away than they are, the processor then delays all of the other speakers by an extra 12 milliseconds so that the sub sound hits the main listening position at the same time as the other speakers. If you don’t know the delay in your subwoofer, check out our subwoofer calibration video where we show you exactly how to find the delay and phase align your subs.
Now that we have the distances right, we want to run room optimization on the subwoofers if they have it. In this case, the JL Audio subs have a great calibration system that is relatively automated. You essentially put the mic in the main listening position and hit one button to calibrate the subs. By doing these first, we free up processing power in the Anthem for the room correction. If you are setting up your own system or want to go back and get the most out of your own, be sure to watch our video on how to best set up a receiver that walks through the details of these steps. Once the subs are set, we run ARC Genesis on the Anthem. To do this, you start with your microphone in the main listening position facing upward with the small white dot facing forward. It is key to make sure you’ve turned off all extra noises when you run ARC Genesis, including your HVAC system and anything else creating excess noise. ARC Genesis will have you run test tones with the microphone in multiple positions. Remember that the first position is the most important as it will set the levels of the speakers. Once you are done, ARC will show you the before and after curves. Once that is done, be sure to quickly run through the Audio Advice audio and video calibration tones and patterns. These adjust the center channel speaker, get all of the video settings, correct, etc.
Best Free Home Theater Audio & Video Upgrades w/ Test Tones & Patterns
Once we are done with those calibrations, we listen to some movie clips we know really well for the home theater setup. Oftentimes, we want a more powerful impact from a gunshot or explosion. For this, we go into ARC pro mode and bring up the room gain slightly. Most rooms sound really good with around 3-4db room gain. We then add a slight amount of deep bass boost. In this room, we added just 1 db of deep bass boost. If the room has an acoustically transparent screen and B&W speakers as this one does, we also will increase the maximum correction frequency all of the way up to 20khz vs. the default 5khz because the screen is slightly impacting the sound and has a greater effect at higher frequencies. This is also true of the acoustically transparent fabric covering the sides and rears. By recalculating the curves all of the way up to 20khz, you immediately get better imaging and highs. Anthem will be releasing an improved version of Arc Genesis that we have been beta testing that includes phase alignment. When they do, we will release a full video going through best practices on how to get the most of it.