New AV preamp setup


Hi. Long time lurker, first time question. Hopefully it’s not a stupid one, and posted in the right section.

I just purchased a Marantz AV 7706 home theater preamp to replace my aging and ailing Parasound unit that I love, but isn’t worth trying to fix. I finally bit the bullet and bought the Marantz; I realize there are others that are better, but this was what the budget could tolerate at this point. In any event, I was using the Audessy program to calibrate the speakers in my 5.1 set up, and the program told me that one of my speakers was out of phase. This kind of surprised me, as I understand the concept, and I’m fairly meticulous when wiring speakers, but I thought OK maybe I made some mistake. So I switched the wires on the offending speaker, and reran the program – I got the same error message, for the same speaker. There are only two wires, and only two ways to connect them, so I don’t know how both can be out of phase.

My wiring set up is admittedly a little complicated. When I built my house 20 years ago, I ran wiring through the walls for the home theater system in the family room in which it resides. So I’ve got wires that run from my amp to a central connector panel. Wires then run from that panel to individual wall plate connectors for each speaker. Then wires run from the individual connector to the speaker. But regardless of the multiple connections, switching the wires at any one location should change the phase, regardless of how the other wire runs are connected correct?

Any idea what I’m missing, or what else might be wrong? Thanks.

mbarrett635

Be sure your AVR firmware and version of Audssey is up to date. 

With a battery, you can prove phase.  Just any AA or other 1.5 V battery. 

Both could be out of phase if the speaker itself has the woofer and tweeter out of phase so the software is detecting a problem at two different frequencies.  I have no idea if Audessy works that way, but it is a possibility.  Can you swap speakers to see if the problem follows the speaker? 

 

All good advice, but a couple of things — I did update the software, and the speakers are Bose 901s, so no woofer/tweeter to be separately in/out of phase (although I guess one or more of the drivers could be out of phase with the others). It’s a pretty simple matter to swap speakers, so I’ll give that a try. 

@mbarrett635 

 

I had contacted Audyssey about it sometimes ago and they confirmed that there was a bug in their software. They advised that I double check my wiring and if confirmed correct to just click on IGNORE. It’s not you, it’s Audyssey. 

@spenav   Wow, thanks. Of all the possible reasons, that one honestly never occurred to me.