Anthem: Doing the HT / 2 Channel Tango

I’ve been the happy owner of a Luxman 507ux fed by a Mytek Brooklyn for about 2 years. Extremely happy with the 2 channel performance, especially with Roon as the source.

For about the same time I’ve created kind of a hybrid system. An Anthem AVM 50 processor feeding 3 IcePower monoblocks, and a subwoofer, with L/R going to the Luxman, and a miniDSP doing room correction somewhere in there.

I finally bit the bullet today and purchased an Anthem MRX 540. I’m always leery of new HT equipment because a lot of highly rated stuff sounds like crap to me. I’ve spent a lot of money on Emotiva and Onkyo solutions which just sucked. My significantly older Theta Casanova easily spanked all of them. The AVM 50 was at least OK, but the MRX 540 is a lot better sounding, even as a preamp.

It’s not a home run. I can’t get the Audio Return Channel to work, and the lack of Roon support means it’s useless as a streamer for me, but still I have to say I’m really happy with the overall sound quality, and this is before any calibration has happened.

In particular it's the background detail, the ambient sound queues feel like they are filling the room a lot better than the AVM 50.

Over the next week or two I’ll set up the subwoofer, and run the ARC to see if I like the choices it makes with minimal intervention.