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Help! Anthem STR preamp ARC sounds bad now compared to off

Last time I used ARC, it made an appreciable positive difference.  Smooth, clean, and bass was deep.

I redid it yesterday, using 10 positions, and two subs, and it sounds much better, not louder, better with it off.  ARC is cancelling out all my bass.  It inverted the subs polarity, when i switch it to normal, bass comes back and is powerful.

I wonder if using 10 positions did something strange. 

Note, I also used the phase testing portion of ARC too to ensure speakers and subs are in phase. 

Did I do something wrong? How could it mess up this bad when it seems to have done so good on my first try a few weeks ago?

Anyone wrestled around with best practices here?
dtximages
jjss49's avatar
jjss49
6,612 posts
 
arc?  huh?
Post removed 
jjss49's avatar
jjss49
6,612 posts
 
yes i am young in my audio journey

arc means Audio Research Company to me... but i am a noob

don’t know much about anthem, i will admit that, stopped paying attention when sonic frontiers folded and chris j started partconnection

onwards
big_greg
6,724 posts
 
Why don't you just re-do it using less positions?
mike_in_nc
1,195 posts
 
@dtximages - Yes, the phase adjustment is applied only to Profile 1. That is documented exactly nowhere, but I discovered it when I noticed Profiles 2-4 were deficient in bass. (I've reported it to Anthem as a bug.) As I mentioned, you can use the preamp's menu system to check the phase settings of Profile 1, then copy those to Profiles 2 through 4.
You might want to try measuring again, but I suggest you do move the mic around. To get best sound for a single listener, or if you are using a directional speaker, it may be best to move it less than Anthem suggests, but do move it a little. It's the spatial averaging that prevents effects that are strongly position-dependent from being "corrected".
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