Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

@kota1 Wow, I think you will be so happy with the Sony, Sony like Yamaha and other big companies can make very good equipment if they want to it's only a matter of approving the budget. Yamaha makes some of the best professional mixers ever. Why didn't you get a tube amp for your headphones, I have Focal and Naim but my headphones seem to accurate and cold not so fun to listen to. I hope you don't have the same problem, please let me know when you get that rig, congrats.

With all the variety in our head shapes, I am not sure how any headphone can sound right "out of the box". Speaker and room to me equate to headphones and head.

There is an old rule in recording called the 3 to 1 rule and it means the distance between the source and first mic is 1 the next mic should be 3 times that distance if you want less phasing.

To me, this rule (guideline) would factor around the typical fundamental tones of what you are recording, with the fundamentals being much more narrow than the extent of harmonics. With a speaker, and each driver working over a defined range, pointing in a specific direction, with the listener assumed to be at tweeter level, the problem would be more bounded. Remember MTM falls apart in the vertical direction if you are too far off axis.

@mijostyn Very good points, especially about the AES inputs, I'll look into that.

So I finally got everything working with my Genelec (analog speaker inputs) system and I was very happy even though the speakers have not been time aligned, I was playing test tracks and different surround sound formats for about 6 hours. Then I listened to my 2.2 system and there was no comparison the 2.2 was so much better, I mean better in a way that was not more accurate but better in a way that was nice to listen to and magical. Subs make all the difference I was very unhappy with my Paradigm 9hs until I bought the separate subs. The 9hs do have balanced Sub drivers but somehow on mine they were very unimpressive even with an adequate 700W amp in each cabinet. The external subs have a 3kW amp and shake the house that's important good base needs to be felt, I spent another 15k on nearly 40k speakers to get the bass right I'm so glad I did.

I think subs can be used in a square cabinet because the length of the frequencies are so long there will be no interference internally. Of course there are the old formulas that are ratios of speaker volume SPL of Frequency and volume the smaller the box the more power you need. 

@donavabdear , I was thinking about getting the new Jim Fosgate designed tube headphone amp The Aries from Black Ice audio which was demoed at this past CEDIA. They don’t have a price yet or a firm release date. I really like my Sony SACD/CD/Blueray player and wanted to try out their reference Signature line. I will likely get the matching headphones after I try it out as a DAC and a preamp. The DAC is a custom field programmable gate array and should be quite interesting vs the ESS and AKM DAC’s out there. This is why it has some of the features you don’t see on most DAC’s like the DSD remastering and higher bit rates on PCM:

DSD native (up to 22.4 MHz) DSD DoP (up to 11.2 MHz) PCM (up to 768 kHz/32 bit)

The fact that it has headphones designed to match the amp was a plus.