Home Theater Fanatics Live! Featuring ONKYO / How to get the best sound from your theater.

[Music] what is up fanatics it's 8 p.m mountain time and that means another episode of home theater fanatics live tonight is episode 133 and we have another magnificent episode for you and this time i'm not even saying it tongue-in-cheek i'm like serious because we have rob and rolf say that 18 times really really fast from onkyo and actually a lot more than akio and we'll get into that here with us and they're going to tell us all about their stuff welcome gentlemen thanks man that was quite the intro where do we get fancy graphics like that um 1995 right here just you know money order check whatever you know pesos whatever i'll hook you up yeah we need to step up the game man we need some fancy graphics you guys have something better than fancy graphics you guys have like a million avr's i can see him right behind rob's head he's all like i just keep these around because it's fun his electric bill is terrible yeah they're all just turned on little radiation going on why don't we uh what do we do with the rolf and rob show instead let's try saying that ten times i think that would be cool if you can get one more r in there that'll you know rob recommend roth and rob recommend reconciliation with the res recalculants i don't know anyway back we can back on track um i think maybe uh let's let's introduce you guys to everybody so they can kind of know who we got who you are you know what's what's going on so rob maybe you go first and let everybody know who you are sure sure so i'm a senior product manager at uh well it's actually 11 trading company right now but um ralph will go into the details but uh we've recently acquired the onkyo and integra brands as well as uh licensing of pioneer and pioneer elite products um i started with ankio about four or five years ago i started in retail back in the early days selling hi-fi because i'd like to take electronics apart and i went to radio shack and bought a book on how to build speakers and i didn't build speakers but i learned about an equilateral triangle and i set up my old goofy rack system and just was blown away and had to be part of this industry forever so from there um i ended up uh having my own custom installation company so i built home theaters for people and uh one day a few years ago um i got a call from a recruiter that um ankio and integra brands wanted somebody with field experience to come in and take a look at their assortment and and see if it's right for not just the custom integration market but for the enthusiast market so let me just put it this way like if you've ever sat and looked at an avr or any audio product and said why did they build it this way you know they should have done this well i was that guy about four years ago so for the last four years i've been working very closely along with rolf with the teams in japan and um what you're about to see in our new lineup for 2021 is is all of that work trying to bring what you guys the home theater enthusiast market as well as custom installation companies that asked for in these products and we're super excited to talk about it so what i heard there was if people don't like the products you guys are to blame and if they like the products you get all the glory yeah and but the best part about this is like we hope that there are things you don't like because we can't really um uh continue to build better products we can't uh uh make them the best and and everything changes at a rapid pace at the speed of a text message nowadays so without feedback from the outside world from the end user or maybe even the custom integrator you know we can't stay on top of our game because we're here busy trying to make it work on the manufacturing side so feedback is the most important uh part of this that's awesome cool uh ralph i think you're up yes and um whereas rob is a senior product manager i am a lowly product manager yeah yeah well uh i got started gosh forever ago back at pioneer i was with them for almost 20 years so i got to see the introduction of all the latest and greatest coolest products like uh plasma tvs dvd recorders and and blu-ray and i got to work on all of that as part of the product planning and marketing team over at pioneer so i got to work with some amazing people on both sides of the pond uh in that industry and then got shuffled over to onkyo usa when ankio japan purchased the home av division of pioneer back in 2015. and i was kind of basically doing the same thing uh to a point in hong kong usa but when rob was brought on board uh to really kind of set the the stage for a rebirth of our custom installation products uh i was uh put in in the field with him to uh learn from him about custom integration uh what the the field needed versus what we thought they needed uh so that has been a tremendous experience for me and uh it's been a huge privilege to work with him in rebuilding the brands that we're going to be sharing with you tonight so the onkyo the pioneer the integra brands you name it we put an amazing amount of work into it over the last few years especially uh so now that they're finally starting to hit the stores we are just i can't tell you how excited we are to finally see the fruits of our labor and it's been a very long and very difficult labor to get these amazing new products out in the street well that that's awesome and you know just from personal point of view in my personal history you know i've used onkyo for a while um and i actually have a older avr in my basement right now um it's not not active it's not plugged up but i have it um but but i think it's really cool that that you guys are really working to reinvigorate you know akio and but that includes you know pioneer and also um integra as well right yeah absolutely i mean it's it's again it's been a a very long road uh but we finally gotten to the point where we have the the attention the ear of the actual uh engineers and the incredibly talented people that are in japan working on uh building all these new products and we're in a position now where we can actually influence uh the feature sets that we get in these receivers so it's not it's it it was great growing up with these brands like so many people on this on this uh show uh can attest to and being in the retail space and finally as a manufacturer getting to work with these brands hands-on but actually being in a position now to get people what they've been asking for for all these years uh is is really a great feeling uh to be a part of that process that's cool and one one other question i think just around the organization of things and i've had a bunch of people ask me this question since i you know posted up that you'll be on you know people have been asking me they're like what's up with ankio and klipsch what's that deal we have no idea no no everybody's like what and i think that nobody nobody knows but i've been asked a lot that question well we get asked that a lot too half the time it's from family members like who do you work for again um it's it's in a nutshell what happened is very recently within the last week or so the the deal was finally inked science wow that um vox the parent company of klitsch and premium audio company which the the company that rob and i work for is is called 11 trading company and they're they're the sales arm of premium audio company and premium audio company includes a lot of brands including clips so we're all kind of hand and glove a lot of across the uh the aisle work going back and forth between all these brands um but it within the last week a very long process involved where vox and sharp have partnered to purchase the home av division of ankio the same way that anku had originally five six years ago purchased the home av division of pioneer so now uh we have uh direct access to ankyo for onkyo and integra product and we went to pioneer corporation which still exists even though they did sell off all their different divisions to different companies uh including the av division of course to ankio but they they still exist as as a brand so you know we have to go to pioneer corporation and uh working on an agreement with them that we can continue to produce product with the pioneer or the elite name on them uh you know like anything else as a business if you've got a very prestigious name in the industry you don't want your name on just anything so we have to make sure that we present to them a roadmap a plan this is what we think about the brand this is where we think it can go these are the things we want to do and uh as i think a lot of people on this call know that's a brand that has been around for almost 90 years now and has an amazing legacy but in the last five six seven years in particular it's kind of fallen off the radar for a lot of consumers out there for a number of reasons and we want to change that in a big big way so that's why we have to work directly with pioneer corporations so it's a little convoluted this time many layers to it but at the end of the day the the result is we're all focused all these different companies are focused on one core idea one goal and that's to make the best av receivers and two channel audio products in the industry that's awesome that's awesome hey uh i i need to interrupt here so please brother give him a scratchy thread giles happy birthday man happy birthday buddy you're you're so nice um yeah and facebook user one of the faceless facebook users has called it out yes i today is is the day and i'm sharing it with you so my wife said so oh let's go do some special stuff tonight and i said oh i've got something special lined up already it's it's stream night and i've got 11 trading company coming on and she's like who i'm like oh you've watched the show and you'll know so pioneer elite um you know you're uh cut from the same cloth my friend because uh you know we wouldn't be here either if if we didn't love this and we're home theater fanatics so that's that's why we're in this industry we don't want to make sewing machines you know we're not product guys who work with engineers to build oven mitts or dishwashers you know we're in this because we were stung by it at a probably an early age and just said this is what i need to be doing with my life and uh glad to be surrounded by uh like-minded folks right well and this is the place if you want home theater fanatics we got them along with two channels as well and speaking of that just i'm going to shout out a few people here uh hi-fi haven hey man glad to have you here tonight my mail is here with us as well um he said i have a fancy countdown indeed i do indeed i do easy ht tech is with us what's up man how you doing um another faceless facebook user that's given us that what's up i don't know whatever those are double h's man that's the horns dude yeah yo theo come on man how about this one this this i saw this that's hang loose yeah that's surfer shocker bra i heard that a lot kevin sorkin is with us um he uh he runs gsg audio or is one of the partners there they make subwoofers if you like bass he's your best friend uh good dude uh a whole bunch of people with this uh uh harm herman is with us from over in china we got d13 up in the house brian whitley and the list goes on and on but you know the i'm looking at some comments here and uh everybody's really happy to to to see you guys and you know i've got folks calling out stuff you know like i've got a pioneer vsx lx304 i don't know what that is but it sounds cool right and i've got this and i've got that and here's another i've got a vsx lx 503 and so you know there's you know there's a lot of uh emotional ties i think to this gear you know people are like i have it or i had it and you know i got it at this time of my life and i remember i was just getting married and had my first kid and blah blah you know it's interesting how the stuff ties together um but to carry on the i guess the comparison of equipment to children you said you're about to birth new children right so you know you have a new lineup that is just dropping now maybe we can start out with that and talk talk about what you guys have built into it some of the features and that kind of stuff that's in this equipment yeah you know um before before we dive into that something you said a few seconds ago about emotions you know emotions are running high on this call already with all the people that are attending uh rob and i are incredibly emotional about what we do um we are fanatics just like you are giles so the conversation that we have on an almost daily basis the amount of emotion going back and forth like when we don't get things the way we want them uh the amount of ranting and raving and hissy fits we have until we can finally beat the uh the engineers into submission to doing what needs to be done uh we are audio files we are video files so we take this very seriously just as much as our fan base does so you know we're very we're very pleased to see the the kind of feedback that's in the comments section right now it's it makes what we do uh even more worthwhile i think so enough of stroke in everybody's egos uh let me share my screen for just a second if i can and yeah yeah pop it up and i'll jam it up there for everybody to take a look at yeah i'll jump into um let's see don't show these tips again it says share screen okay all right so let's let's uh jump into i've got i've got your whole screen this time including i got old in my hands let me see okay here we go oh man that's magic right there well done yeah thank you very much so ak ultra hd logo i made in photoshop because you know all the other hd logos out there for aka that i could find were all owned by other companies whose names i won't mention starts with an snns and why um so i'm just your own now though i got my own man it's yeah it's all about me today uh so we have of course hdmi 2.1 and before anybody asks before anybody gets excited it is the new hdmi 2.1 not last year's hdmi 2.1 it's the hdmi 2.1 for 20 21. i mean meaning that you don't need an extra external box to just make it function no we do not all right okay i just i i mean you gotta ask these days no i know i know yeah that's the big question that's going around is is do we need an external box to actually get all the benefits of the hdmi 2.1 uh specification the answer is absolutely not uh so you know the first thing that's obvious about hdmi 2.1 is 8k so of course we support ak ultra hd 8k at 60 and 4k at 120 as we as we'll get into in just a second here so it's it's not just about the increase in resolution although that i think is something that is really misrepresented out there in the industry by the a lot of the pundits out there the journalists because you know so many people out there are saying oh you don't need a k resolution 4k was great well they said the same thing about 4k and they said the same thing about 1080p back in the day the one thing that's not changing in people's homes is the viewing distance right i mean you're not getting a bigger tv and suddenly moving into a bigger place so that you can sit further away from this bigger tv people are always talking about the optimal viewing distance and sure that that has a legitimate point to a point but the one thing that's not changing in people's homes when they upgrade their audio video system is the actual viewing distance from the tv and the real big benefit of 8k just like we saw in 4k is because you have a much denser pixel structure you can maintain that original seating distance and have the enjoyment factor of a much larger tv screen for a true theater kind of experience where you've got this almost wrap around screen experience going into your peripheral vision which is what widescreen was all about in the first place way back in the day so that kind of experience can really be expanded upon tremendously without any loss of detail so that's uh to me as as a video file and i hate to say this in front of everybody but i am a video file first before i'm an audiophile i got into the audio end of things a little bit later i cut my teeth on on rear projection flat panel tvs so well you uh you got to work with all the the kuro plasma yeah right yes so the whole hero and purevision thing that was uh that that's where i grew up in so in the industry spite of the great beard i'm actually only 21. i'm only 18. well somebody said sweet 16 in the comments oh no that was two years ago i'm totally 18. it's been a hard life but i see some black in the bottom of that beard though can blackbeard explain that look you can't really see here but you know i'm getting the gray coming in and actually i would have a full head of gray hair but my body rejects gray hair so you know it just as it started turning gray just poof fell out i don't know all of my grey is stressed from working with rob so as rob smiles and says yes it is all of my damage from you ralph is internal and emotional yeah your therapy bills are through the roof i know i have one question about the 8k so sure you know does 8k give us four times the enjoyment of 4k you know i think it's it's uh rhythmic so just like we had that incredible jump in pixels that is more than four and more than eight so you know not quite two million pixels for 1080p and then you go to uh was it 16 million for 4k i don't know i'm not a mathematician what the heck is this uh but yeah it's just it just goes through the roof i actually just got my first 4k tv believe it or not last uh this time last year i was still using my uh kuro last generation kuro tv okay i have to ask this question sure if we did a shootout today and we took the best plasma kuro ever built the the most pristine of pristines and line that up against a really good oled take out all the other stuff you know don't worry about the thickness of it or any of that kind of stuff just pure picture how do you think those two would compare in that shootout well it's kind of six and one half dozen the other really i mean from from just a straight up picture quality perspective black levels uh color reproduction um the oled would would win it would it would bounce it out a little bit push it a push over the edge it would uh the the thing that you might see that would be very very competitive even by today's standards uh and i would still get a lot of comments from a lot of video files that would look at micro tv uh is the uh the motion processing in the curves was beyond reproach uh so we a lot of people don't remember this but one of the big selling points to uh purevision curro was our 3-3 pull down versus 3-3 3-2 pull-down that was traditionally done by every other brand under the sun so we would operate actually at 72 hertz on our panels which meant that you could actually do some incredibly fine and smooth film to video transitions for very very accurate motion reproduction and that was still very very exceptional and the color reproduction of course between a plasma and an old letter are pretty close in how they do things but uh yeah the oleds definitely have the edge you know in the last couple of generations in particular i think you know when you go to scale to the small obviously there were neither anything larger than like maybe a 61 inch nac plasma panel um but you know if you had a 60 inch 1080p curve next to a 60 inch 4k oled provided the plasma was brand new out of the box you'd probably have a pretty tough time uh deciding which one was better but you'd probably end up going with the oled at the end of the day that's cool that's cool anyway sorry to derail things there but you know i'm all about train wrecks right on that technology at the high end is not not that bad still these days not at all no not at all um and and speaking about technology old versus new i mean hdmi it's been around forever and as we all know it just works all the time right perfectly uh but no they're always going to be yeah yeah you're always going to be upgrades you're always going to be refinements to any technology and hdmi is is no different one of the things that i wanted to show to everybody today is something that's still a little bit of a confusion factor and i want to make sure that everybody's clear on this is uh where cables are concerned under the hdmi 2.1 specification if you want to get one of those hdmi ultra high speed logos and certification free hdmi cable that means you have to get certified at the maximum bandwidth of 48 gigabits per second for cables for hardware virtually every hardware manufacturer under the sun including the company that makes the hdmi 2.1 chipsets for pioneer onkyo integra and virtually every other consumer av and professional av brand out there uh 40 gigabits is going to be 99.999 the common theme in hardware so 40 gigabits for hardware 48 gigabytes for cable now the caveat to this is no sooner did i make up this slide than jvc i believe announced a new front projector that has 48 gigabit hardware now i don't really understand that frankly because the 48 gigabits bandwidth is for resolutions like you know 10k it could pass a 10k through signal at 48 gigabits per second but the video processor in that projector is not a 10k video processor so i don't really understand what the point is to that but you know what do i know um i'm sure somebody will educate me on that shortly just to interject usually it starts with a display device because it's like the most ubiquitous device in the system so you'll usually see the the advances start at the display device and then slowly trickle down into source components and in the case of an avr we're a repeater device yeah so uh yeah we're really just saying okay you know mr source what can you do and we we just want to repeat that to the tv without getting in the way yeah so for all the source devices that are on the market today our 40 gigabit per second bandwidth uh is more than enough space to handle any of the source components out there whether they're streaming devices or the latest and greatest game consoles and and to that point you know the xbox series x is capped at 40 gigabits per second and the playstation 5 is 32 actually yeah uh speaking of which my next all i heard there was xbox is better well you know we we thoroughly go through both of them and i will say that there are some awesome things about both of them and when i switch between the two i go no this one's better oh that one's better no this one's better and you know i i enjoy a certain game on one and and you know maybe not so much on the other and vice versa so they're both pretty cool devices that's cool you know and part of the whole uh hdmi 2.1 spec it's it's kind of a mishmash of technologies that that actually go back uh a generation or so but have all been combined under the hdmi 2.1 specification um but some of them are brand new of course like 4k resolution with high dynamic range at 120 hertz or 120 frames per second and that's something that our receivers are able to pass through without any hiccups unlike other brands which we won't mention here um so part part of those uh advances that you get with hdmi 2.1 are things like game mode and this is where things get a little confusing because the roush point earlier you see a lot of advanced technology starting the display end of things so hdmi 20b displays out there some of them from last year actually support game mode already but this has now been included in the hdmi 2.1 specification so if you get a new hdmi 2.1 product it's going to support all of these technologies it's all all part of the the encompassing realm of of technology so to speak uh game mode of course you know when you plug in a xbox or a playstation 5 into a receiver and pass that signal through the tv or directly to the tv if it's got hdmi 2.1 or game mode capabilities built into it already it will automatically switch the tv into game mode for auto low latency and all those fun features and like dynamic hdr for example which as far as i know i'm the only one in the whole world that thinks that that's kind of redundant because what does the d and hdr stand for dynamic i don't know yes it's it's uh how dumb is rolf right no it's a dynamic high dynamic range so uh whatever high dynamic ranges dynamic makes it better so uh you've got to make it better it makes it make dynamic makes high dynamic range better makes it more dynamic so we uh get a more lifelike picture and especially where games are concerned there's a lot of new new uh 4k games out there that are encoded in hdr and dynamic hdr and they just make these games really pop like like you're looking into the real world i don't need to tell you guys that you know that for yourself uh and uh variable refresh rate of course too that's essential for the uh console on the desktop pc gamers um that that's really cool too because you know you've got these these scenes that have been rendered with an incredible amount of detail but typically you know when you have a scene like like we are now or we're just talking to each other without really moving around too much the amount of detail in the picture can be quite high but the minute the bullets start flying and the boats start jumping across the water and the airplanes fly by those scenes happen so quickly the refresh rates can can really ramp up and then you start to lose information so having variable refresh rate really helps improve that picture quality and the way that the display will render the information that's being generated by the console or the pc so it keeps all of that information intact regardless of what the refresh rate is for that particular scene that's cool uh what else we got oh this is interesting now you mentioned earlier giles that uh you know people were wondering what the relationship between onkyo and klipsch was well hey we're joined at the hip or at the top of the head as the case may be um this is something that was kind of inevitable you know clips engineers and ocule engineers in the same house they had to uh come up with something that was kind of uh unique and cool typically when you do any kind of automatic room calibration like we've got accu eq and ocular products and mcacc multi-channel acoustic calibration expialidocious in the pioneer products uh when you do any kind of in-house calibration system uh it will automatically detect the capabilities of speakers and pick a crossover point that it thinks is appropriate and in a lot of cases that that's okay that that works pretty well but when you talk to a speaker designer and engineer for speakers and you talk about changing crossovers higgledy-piggledy that kind of upsets people because they've worked their entire careers to develop a specific sound from these speakers that they're engineering and putting into production and when you change crossovers you can really affect how that speaker performs and how it gets that information that they work so hard to share with you um and you know we talked about emotion earlier they get very emotional when you talk about just changing crossover levels uh not the way that they think are optimized so oncoengineers and klipsch engineers got together and they came up with something that they call the clips mode and for all the clips junkies on the call tonight if you have clips reference speakers you can actually go into the setup of the receiver when you first get it out of the box and hook it up to your speakers and tell it that you are using clip speakers and it will give you a complete list of every single clips reference speaker known to man and you can pick and choose the specific clips reference model for the particular application that you're using like you can see here for example we selected these speakers from clips reference for those particular channels and then once you've done that it will automatically assign the uh engineers preferred crossover points for those particular model clips reference speakers so then you'll go okay i have to i have to do this one day do it right now no i mean well i don't have a full set of clip speakers nor onkyo is the store closed get online and order something got a credit card no this is this is kind of cool it is really cool i mean it's it's kind of kind of niche and it's kind of like you know lock-in kind of stuff but man it's pretty sweet if you got the right pieces yeah if you got the right pieces yeah and this is also something you know rob and i can go on literally for days about differentiations of the brands you know they all have so many similar features how do we actually differentiate them when we're influencing their designs and putting them into stores and figuring out what prices to sell them at and this is uh some that's only found in onkyo and integra it's not found in pioneer or pioneer elite so that right there is a very interesting differentiator hmm okay one one other question i have uh what is double bass because whenever somebody says would you like double bass my answer typically will be yes please well yes absolutely why not yeah but you have it turned off i know i don't did we pick maybe they didn't oh no they picked the subwoofer they picked the r100sw so uh no i mean silly them they should have double bass turned on all the time uh you know if we had quadruple bass i'd be all over that i agree it's like eight kb so double bass is a setting where you can select whether or not uh let me backtrack when you first get the receiver out of the box the receiver doesn't know what you're hooking up to it in terms of speakers they don't know what the the range of the speakers are you could have little bookshelves you could have satellite speakers you could have big giant tower speakers they don't speakers don't talk to your avr they don't exactly avr doesn't know maybe someday um so the subwoofer levels are usually uh and the crossover points are automatically set to a point where whatever you play for that receiver the first time if you're a novice and you don't really understand that there isn't going to be a signal that's going to try to send out something that's completely full range for a little teeny tiny speaker that will pop so if you do have full range speakers great if you add a subwoofer great you would turn subwoofer setting on in the speaker configuration you would say yes i have a subwoofer but if you want to have bass from a subwoofer playing back regardless of what the content is in other words a sub for low frequency effects for movies is a given people typically understand the subwoofers are fantastic for watching multi-channel surround sound movies but other people don't realize though is that subwoofers are actually very important for two channel music listening because a sub is designed to play those bottom octaves that even full range speakers can have trouble playing back without drawing a ridiculous amount of power from the amplifier which that amplifier may not be able to sustain so having a subwoofer in the mix can actually really help smooth out the bottom frequencies and two channel music listening not just for multi-channel movies so if you even if you had full range speakers that could typically go pretty low if you want to have the subwoofer playing while you're playing two channel music you would turn what they called double bass on gotcha i'm 2.1 for life so i'm with you yeah so again if you were to if you're happy with your full range speakers or even some big of stand mounted speakers if you're happy with the bass performance with those and you've got a subwoofer mix you don't have to have bass you don't have to have the subwoofer on but for people like you and me that like bass we would probably want to turn the subwoofer on in that case we would choose the option double bass and churn that from off to on very cool that was a very long-winded way of saying it's mo bass mo bass no better yeah so what else do we got i don't know let's keep moving here um oh here we go yes this is this is the game changer ladies and gentlemen so uh as many people know already because we've not been shy about it a lot of press announcements out there starting with the onkyo txnr7100 and the integra 3.4 and the elite 305 we get drac d-rack is you know they should be paying me to talk about drac because i can just talk about it forever uh it's it's really an exceptional audio acoustic room calibration uh solution it's uh you know dts whenever dts designs and builds a recording facility or calibrates a movie theater for like you know 150 people or 200 people they use drac pro to calibrate these spaces and they're used also by a lot of luxury audio auto manufacturers as well too when they're calibrating these high-end uh audio systems that are going into these rolls-royces and bentleys and so forth so for the consumer there are a couple of flavors of drac out there there's there's d-rack light which is just d-rack and then there's d-rack live and d-rack live is a full 20 to 20 spectrum range of frequency responses that it can detect and calibrate for so you know whether you're using two channel or heck even mono if you're using you know seven nine ten eleven twelve speakers drac is is the industry preferred choice among professionals and discerning audio files well it sounds like a marketing ad it really does i mean it sounds like you read that off a script well i'm making it up in my head as i'm going along so i'm just i'm just remembering all the things that i've talked about drock in the past and they're all kind of meshing together right now so i'm on a roll so i'ma stick with it so drock is honest the first time i played with d-rack i was like what the hell have i got myself into because it looked really scary and really complex but it's actually really straightforward it's um uh you don't really need much to really dive in and get into the meat and potatoes of it and the reason i have this picture here of the nice fluffy clouds uh is because all drac computations are done in the cloud so when you have a receiver like the 7100 from onkyo and you hook it up to your network for the first time and then you want to calibrate using the drac software that's built in um you don't need a super powerful processor in the receiver to do this because all the uh test tones that are being generated by the receiver and uh captured by the microphone that you're using we'll talk about that in just a second uh all that information is not being processed in the receiver it's going out to the cloud so master computer brainiac on the cloud is going woo information and so there's a super computer that crunches your numbers for you it crunches your numbers for you yes absolutely kind of like you know a uh a fortifying breakfast cereal uh and then i have no or skynet i mean yeah yeah um so when you want to calibrate with drac you get a couple of options with us with our products out there is you can use the drac app that's built into our free android and apple devices control app that's available on the android apple store is completely free and it gives you complete total control of the receiver but it also includes the drac app so this is just one particular screen capture that i got uh from the drak app on the mobile device i just want to say that somebody needs subwoofers everybody needs something yeah somebody in this graph they need some subwoofers everybody needs subwoofers as many subwoofers as possible please and you can do this with the included wired microphone that comes with the receiver out of the box so if you want to get great response from your speakers in the the unique acoustic space that you're in and everybody's space is unique even in cookie cutter homes and apartments every space is always unique because of the furniture and the carpets lack of carpets curtains drapes whatever you know the story every space is unique so to get the best impact out of that audio system that you've invested so much time wanting an emotion into building uh use drak open up the app plug in the included microphone from the receiver and it will walk you in baby steps hold your hand and tell you okay let's configure the system what speakers are how many speakers are you using okay now i know all right position the microphone here let's run some test tones okay let's move the microphone over there you get up to nine different microphone positions that you can calibrate for using the mobile app uh 13 in the uh laptop or desktop app version of drak um but with the the included microphone that we're using here you can get up to nine positions and then you can go into once the cloud is computed with those uh responses should be in an ideal environment you can go in and make your own personal adjustments because everybody has their own taste and sound so you can go in and like okay yeah drock says it should sound like this but you know i want more center channel plus three decibels everybody does it yeah and i want more what i want more bass so you can go in and make adjustments to your heart's content after the fact we kind of have a philosophy like doctors which is do no harm our philosophy for audio is it's your system do do what you want with it we don't care uh we're going to give you the tools to get the sound you want may not be the sound that i want or your neighbor wants but it's the sound you want and and you're the most important person so let's give you the tools to get the sound you want this is all well and good for out of the box and getting a much better audio experience than you would normally get if you just plugged in everything and hit play on your source device but what if you're say an integrator and you've got that receiver in a rack in a closet in the basement and the home theater space is upstairs two floors away that microphone that's included in the box that cord is not going to reach from that receiver wherever it happens to be all the way up the stairs and into the home theater space so what can you do well the solution is pretty simple and drac itself is pretty simple as well too what you can do is you can go to the desktop or pc laptop or windows application of drac and you can get a 99 microphone on amazon that's recommended by drac this one here that's shown on screen is a dsp one from uh or a umic one microphone from mini dsp plug that into your laptop and now you're completely untethered from the receiver you can leave that receiver wherever it is somewhere else in the house and go back into the home theater space and do all the calibration from the comfort of the home theater space whether it's a single seated position or multi-seated positions and get an even better result than you will using the mobile app and the included wired microphone and again earlier i said that that was kind of intimidating the first time i opened it up and tried it myself but really once you go past start the ease of use the friendliness of which it says okay you're here now we're gonna go there this is how we get there these are the results okay now you can play with the results it's it's much less intimidating than it appears at first blush so if anybody out there has not used iraq and you're interested in using it by all means try it out it's not that scary so when when you use it in this uh and this form factor i guess with the pc and your microphone so you go and you know you've got your tool there and you know for diy folks is it you know it's kind of similar to a rew kind of experience i would guess but at the end of the day is this creating some kind of like a xml or configuration file that it dumps down to your processor and then that will set all your crossover points and volume and latency and all that kind of stuff it does actually and i'm not going to talk about it in detail right here i'm going to leave that to rob because rob has some interesting things that he's going to show us uh in just a few minutes regarding some of the more advanced features in our product and part of that will actually specifically address that question so uh i'll leave that for rob to talk about i want to steal his thunder uh but i will move on from here now that we know we have drac in the mix and see what else we've got uh oh yeah he's very excited he's like yeah we're done with d-rack uh oh i am done actually so i'm done babbling and yes we are 75 years old this year hooray us so it's our birthday and your birthday it i'm perfect i love it one thing i wanted to uh one thing i wanted to ask about was um how does thx come into this mix uh thx is something that uh ankio was actually first in the consumer industry to support in a home theater av product uh gosh when was that 1993 i think it was with the uh let me see if i can get that model number right the tx sv 919 thx was was the model um that was well done amazing receiver i actually was selling those in retail just built like a tank it was beautiful beautiful um we've always been obsessed with reproduction of audio and video accurately and with the current lineup uh that's that philosophy hasn't changed in the onkyo and the integra models with onkyo that starts with the uh actually the tx and our 6100 which is our mid-tier uh priced onkyo product and then it goes into 7100 the tx rz50 also in the onco line on the integra line it starts with the drx 5.4 and another differentiator is that we are not including thx in the pioneer elite line uh and and that's another story all in and of itself but for onkyo and integra for our customer base we did some surveys a few years back and thx is a very very important name brand recognition and feature set for our product and you know we could spend this entire conversation talking about the benefits of thx and how it can make a custom integrator who's building home theater make their life uh a lot better but again that's another technical propeller head conversation for another session what it really boils down to for us as a manufacturer from a very uh simplistic if you will standpoint which is not doing thx a favor here but they are an unbiased third-party testing house if you will and they will literally run these receivers through a a gamut of thousands of tests over a period of about a week where they will test every single signal pathway for the audio and the video circuitry and the amplifier and every combination of user feature sets that you can possibly think of it's thousands of tests without any exaggeration and the the end goal is to see if these products cannot only just pass audio and video signals without anything being added or anything taken away it's also to make sure that the amplifier is incredibly clean and dynamic and has the amperage and the the punch to provide the dynamic energy that's required to reproduce these films and these music and now these games that we all enjoy the way that the the content creator wants you to hear it so it's a guarantee of performance if you will that's what the thx logo is all about is is sir ma'am this amplifier this processor is going to give you the same experience in your home that you would expect to get in a multi-million dollar professional movie theater in your home uh so that's what is very exciting for us about maintaining our relationship with thx it's not just a logo that we pay for it gets silk screen on the front of the receivers uh it's it's a it's a testament to the engineering skill uh for our engineers not to sound redundant in making audio and video products that really are incredibly neutral when it comes to whatever you're putting into it and making sure that you get the maximum performance from them right on cool you know i feel a little bit bad right now because i don't think rob's really talked at all that's good that's a good thing no no rob's going to blow everybody out of the water in just a minute he's going to make everybody's going to like rolf who after they hear rob because he's got he's got the cool to talk about oh oh i said a naughty letter you know so bad oh my god you know uh the the point about thx for me um yeah it was really cool growing up and um seeing that you know splash screen happened before star wars and all that and of course it had a emotional impact uh but then later on when i started to build theater spaces first as a merchandiser for retail so i spent like 14 years in retail building stores and merchandising and putting systems together with every brand under the sun and as i started to learn a little bit more um i took a course by anthony gramani who worked for lucasfilm and i realized that it's a whole lot more than that you know splash screen logo and that there are uh you know decades invested into sight lines and room dimensions and things like that and acoustics and i learned a whole lot about acoustics and if you have a chance and you can take an online thx uh uh you know even the entry level course there's so much to learn there generally speaking about home theater that it's just fun regardless of any logos or splash screens or surround modes that you know you don't use anymore you know as you know as the case may be in your particular system so there's a legacy of an incredible amount of information available by those folks and they have invested decades into their training programs so i mean it's kind of like hanging out with home theater fanatics you know and forget about oh i don't like using the thx surround mode okay don't use it but you know what that brand that company is still heavily invested in building better theaters whether it be professional concerts or right in your home and being thx certified select it basically means that it's certified to up to a certain amount of like let's say 2 000 cubic feet right which is like a typical media room living room right so they're not telling you oh you know take this integra receiver or the sankyo receiver that's 80 watts per channel or 100 watts per channel and stick it in you know an imax theater right you know it's not like that at all i mean we all have a very deep understanding of what it takes to move air in that capacity of a venue but really uh there's so much to learn i learned a whole lot actually you know to be honest after the gramani courses and after doing my own research and building some rooms i learned a whole lot of real world stuff about acoustics i'm also a musician and done recordings and all that stuff went to nyu for sound design and this and that but the point is when you see it in a one-day training by thx they've taken all of those things that took me so freaking long you know and like all those trial and error situations and they basically condensed it into like a day or two training so it's a whole lot of fun a whole lot of fun um uh that being said i don't even know what we were talking about but let me let me just you know you know you were gonna wow us with something is what we were talking about rolfe is a very eloquent presenter and i'm not and uh instead i'm just gonna like kind of uh peel back i'm gonna peel the curtain back a little bit and show you guys out there what it's like on our side because you know when i was you you know when i wasn't working in the industry i you know just couldn't imagine what goes on behind the scenes and how things are made and you know why was this done this way um so i'm gonna i'm gonna share my screen and just show you a couple of files that i'll probably get in trouble for sharing quite honestly the secret sauce yeah so i mean this is what it took to communicate on how the drak app in our in our app works right so when you when you when you get the onkyo app this is you know part just part not the programming this is part of understanding how the user is going to interact with this so you know it's really easy to say well i like this better i like that better but believe me when i tell you like there's a lot of late nights from folks just like you that would sit there and go no this isn't right we have to make it better and you know it's it's there's a whole lot at stake and a lot of uh you know you ever wonder why a firmware upgrade takes so long it's because it'll affect everything uh in that software patch so you know rolf mentioned differentiation between the brands well if you had onkyo and integra as your products and you built an awesome piece of software it's like what if it's awesome put it in both products and let everybody enjoy it and that's really what what it's become so i'll also show you what our apis look like so was that the uh was that a ui flu chart yeah yeah well that was well let me explain you know um don't don't show anybody the hdmi diagnostics flow chart that was a nightmare yeah so so that was just the app you know flow chart in well listen there's a lot of tools out there that communicate these things and some brands that have been around for a while are experts at those tools and sometimes you'll receive something that's in like lotus notes and you're like what but you know yeah but i mean but you know because it's a legacy it's a legacy procedure that works for their form of communication so they're extremely extremely detailed talented smart folks but where do we come in we're dumb and we just like to sit down and listen to movies and watch movies right so we say okay that all that technical stuff's really cool but if it doesn't produce an entertaining end result and it's not fun and easy to use well to be honest i like the rubik's cube challenge but you know for the majority of people like you don't want to be sitting there not being able to watch a movie because you can't figure out what the hell is going on so that's where we come in and we say you know we're on home theater fanatics and people are asking about thx and people are asking about this and we want to bring that um enthusiasm to the engineering boardrooms and i was in japan and i sat down and these two big board rooms went in osaka and ralph's been through this stuff too and uh in tokyo and it was like this like dark ominous feeling and everybody's like staring at you like what can you possibly teach us and i'm sure they didn't mean that but it felt like that you know the first couple times and uh you know if you stick with it and you prove the value of what it is that we're asking for it's going to end up in that product and we're testament to it so what we're showing you today with the deer rack and even to some degree the hdmi 2.1 because as much as everybody's been hearing about it and this and that oh it should just work well you know um when lg recently released um dolby atmos uh gaming uh firmware update for the xbox series x nobody had ever used it before and we are we we've loaned one of our rz50s to to a man named vincentio hdtv test who's super sharp guy and he's like you know i can't get it to work and within 24 hours we had a beta for him because our engineers went oh okay i see the symptom we're going to get in there we're going to get this done right so you know it's it's about getting it right as and look you know nothing out there is perfect these are highly complicated devices that communicate with highly complicated devices but the important thing is that there's like guys like us who really are the same as the end user and don't want to sit there and ha and and be annoyed that something's not working right so like ralph said you know we're home theater fanatics we live and breathe this we couldn't be in this business if we didn't because i would just go and make oven mitts or something i don't know i would i'd have to find something else to do because it's a very challenging business but what you're seeing here is you know our command lists that you know yeah it's all expected that all these commands should be in there but you know what when's the last time a human being tested every one of these in multiple control systems with multiple remotes um yeah that that takes um an investment by the way a lot of these say no because this is going back for all you legacy i mean we're going back to the old rdc7 here so you're gonna see things like direct that say no because it didn't exist back then right and that's just the main zone commands so i like kind of i have fun and i say you know if i was um if i was a home theater fanatic and i didn't work in the business i would love to see stuff like this you know you never really see it you just see oh it's this many watts per channel and all that and um actually i will be annoying with that for one second so we were talking about hdmi 2.1 and bandwidth and we made this like handy dandy thing for us on the inside to constantly refer to and you could see that you know once you get past our entry level 5100 every device in our in all the brands lineups have a minimum of 340 gigabit per second inputs which is the extent of the hdmi repeater hardware that's available right now and also the extent of the xbox series x so um that's a major investment in making sure that you have the bandwidth necessary to get done what needs to be done today and i hate to use the word future proof but you know there's a certain amount of that in there too and like when you look at this key uh and i know i like to get into the weeds a little bit but when you look at a key like this you know even the 5100 can do 4k 120 hdr albeit at 420 chroma which is basically what's used in blu-rays so you're not hurting there you know so our entry-level device is bringing an incredible gaming experience uh and also passing through as much as you will really find from a source component at this point until you get up into the higher bit rate when you force for example an xbox to deliver 444 even though the content's coming from netflix right so hey hey rob i think we might not be seeing the same screen that you're seeing right now because we're still stuck on that japanese oh let me go all right screen oh we're still there yeah oh i don't think it's small i don't think it's moving along let me know usually i use um obs for all this sharing so uh just forgive me i will bring that back and now we'll share the screen that i was discussing actually if i do this can i just bounce around like that yeah you can yeah you should be able to bounce around so do you see where it says zone two yep yep okay so great so now i can bounce around so anyways what i was talking about before is this is all our command sets yep right so i'm not going to go over that again but let's look at uh the hdmi bandwidth and now you can see that now with the 40 gig per second yep okay so you could see again i'll just reiterate very quickly that how it's uh 24 gigabit per second you know all the on the 5100 and again if we look at a key like this and we look at the designations of hdmi of the hdmi spec you you want to look for something like 8k 60b which is compressed mode which you can achieve at 24 but we can also achieve 4k 120 hdr but with 420 chroma which is basically what blue discs are sampled at so you know and i'm just racing through some of this stuff um just to kind of uh give everybody an idea of the you know the thought that goes into it and a lot of it is um based on feedback from the end user you know an enthusiast like ourselves so uh why don't we show a little bit about web setups and some um i think i think it'd be good to talk about the web setup and then it i think it'd be good to talk about the the product mix you know what what's available today versus what's going to be coming in the the future or whatever at least we can can talk about and understand but uh i know people want to know what what they can go look at and see for sure so um what you're looking at here is uh basically i typed the ip address of the 5100 that i have next to me in here and uh from any web browser-based device um you can now go through and basically tweak this thing to your heart's content uh this piece is not direct equipped but if it were you could select direct slots for different inputs um there's also a variety of really really cool tweaky stuff like you could send out test patterns on this particular piece it's you know again it's somewhat limited and it's bandwidth but you could send out test patterns to your um your sync device your tv to ensure that you know you're passing the full bandwidth um say you have a certain source component that's giving you some trouble you can at least uh eliminate your your cable uh situation and the bandwidth that's associated with it and something that's important too is when you're setting up your avr these days and with a lot of tvs it's the same thing you actually want to go in and unlock the full capabilities of the bandwidth and you'll notice that a lot of tvs like you have to go in and turn on 4k 120 and that sort of thing yeah so it's no different in the abrs and the reason why is because somebody walks into a big box store and picks this up and plugs their cable box in and uh you know there's some kind of discrepancy here because their cables can't pass full bandwidth uh they're still got a picture going on the screen but i know for advanced users like the folks on this on this call um stuff like this is you know paramount to uh getting the full you know the full experience and then we also have really crazy stuff in here if you really want to go bananas and this is password protected so you know your your uh little johnny's not going to figure out how to access an ip address and go in there and start turning off dolby vision right um but this again is is for you know faster switching between components uh easier to troubleshoot um any type of weird stuff that might happen with like an old satellite box say i know a lot of folks have an older satellite box to pick up a station from somewhere around the world and they just won't let go of it so there's been an ultra ultra a lot of effort put into uh the tweak ability and uh the deep dive into these products hey rob show them uh where you can apply drak yeah so uh let me uh so then uh what i'll do is i'll i should be able to just swap over to this screen right so this is a an integra drx 3.4 it's direct equipped so you would just go to audio and go to drak live and then uh you know i constantly reset my device just to do stuff like this so there's no direct slots but i could select and say you know for blu-ray i want direct slot number two now what would drax slot number two be well let's say it's um your favorite uh hi-fi listening mode where it's really focused in a sweet spot so you could you know perhaps your blu-ray player is a multi-disc player and you have an sacd in there and you want to experience like super high-res you know perfectly uh sweet spot just one listener that's fine but if you switch to drag slot number three maybe in that one it's when the whole family's together watching a movie and they're spread around the room and you created a drag slot for that listening environment right so a direct slide is just a set of configurations for drag for you know what you could just have however many slots you have that's each one is a different config that is correct yeah that's cool and you can set configs for different devices which is pretty hot too i like that and uh you know if you're somebody who's into control systems i know harmony's uh no longer in business but if you're like a harmony user and you get a you know and they still support the api you know the sky is the limit for how you can create macros to access those drag slots and and also a ton of other like really cool stuff but again you know that's first for somebody that's really tweaking it out and you know but that's what we're here for yeah i want to i want to get my hands on a uh control for their new was it memo or something like that remote control that the new touch screen when they have uh looks so good yeah yeah the neo yeah i actually have one of those uh let me show you something here uh just for fun yeah i've got a i've got a buddy who uh who just got his set up he actually got four of them set up to control like 13 televisions because that's how he rolls um it's pretty pretty cool so i just wanted to interject just saying i was lifting it through some of the comments i just wanted to address a couple of these uh yeah go for it getting set up there uh one of them was asking why pioneer elite's not ghx certified and the reason being for that is is really pretty basic and that's because we're too cheap uh we actually had more thx certified product of pioneer under one brand than all the others combined but over the years it became uh very expensive to go through that whole testing and certification process for a company that really did not have deep pockets and because we had so many products that were thx certified just became a real uh burden on the uh the old bank account and weirdly enough when we surveyed consumers whereas thx was very important as a as a recognition factor for onkyo and integra consumers thx really didn't come into the conversation when we talked to a lot of the old die hard uh pioneer elite customers they they really weren't terribly interested in it so that's really the two the two simple answers to that and just one other uh comment that somebody asked is when can we see a slideshow showing the front and back panels of the receivers are available i do have one ready to go so as soon as rob's is done then we can show them rear and front panel shots yeah go go for a ralph i actually dropped in uh a link to giles for okay beats on the virtual ces that we had and well i've got a few uh slides that i can share here um yeah if you have those handy that that would be even better too uh so here is the the entry 5100 uh which hopefully everybody can see now yep we can see that which there we go there's my full screen so that's a 5100 uh dtsx dolby atmos 7 channels zone b uh which means that it has a little output on the back if you can see my little mouse moving around think of this as like speaker b back in the good old days uh so you know you can see zone b by amp you can have a speaker b or we call it zone b or you can run these out to a uh the base station for some wireless headphones so whatever's playing in the main zone is what's going to play back over zone b so this could this could go to uh an amplifier for some outdoor speakers if you want to listen to uh outdoors what you're listening to on the inside you could do that so some uh even though it's an entry-level receiver still has some pretty uh flexible features built into it and those are those are the antennas that are bent down to the sides yeah it's complete network cable receiver so this has an nxp processor on board uh which among other things uh allows for 802.11 ac wi-fi so much greater range uh more reliable handshakes for wireless devices and more bandwidth for higher resolution files awesome these four inputs are hdmi 2.1 and both are hdmi 2.1 outputs so you could actually play back to uh to two different displays up to 8k on both of those uh outputs simultaneously so you know like a basement movie theater where you've got the big front projection going and then the back you've got a little wet bar a little flat panel tv no matter which way you turn you'd see the same thing so if you had two projectors for increased increased light output could you just cable each of your pjs up to uh one of these outputs and get synced video output for that yeah or you know one for each eye oh right now yeah i like it now is is this available today or is it coming or yes or no we only because because of covid as i'm sure everyone was calling those coveted has caused such chaos in the industry uh from raw materials to manufacturing to shipping in particular so you know every time we turn around a factory here or a factory there had closed and another one had opened so these were all ready to go many months ago and we had to wait for factories to open up and transport to get from point a to point b uh zone b in this case uh and these these uh uh receivers have been trickling into the country right now in very small quantities and some of them are already sold out but don't worry uh they're coming back into the country in much greater quantities over the next several months so the 5100 is in stock right now at uh crutchfield and i think uh best buy yeah ladies and gentlemen now the 6100 is going to show up around the november time frame for the first time so that has not been available yet long story behind that but yeah that that's going to be showing up in november in some pretty good quantities and this is where we get into the thx certification so for some weird reason i don't have that logo at the top usually i do that uh but you can see it on the display there thx cinema uh and this one is also a seven channel but it's now going from zone b to zone two still has zone b if you want to be you can select zone two or zone b uh so discrete zone two for audio and video so this is actually an hdmi matrix built in so if you look at the backbone here one one of our big wins was let's relabel everything in the back so there's no confusion anymore as to what input can do what uh so we have three 18 gigabit per second four k 60 inputs and then we have uh three 8k uh 60 or 4k 120 40 gigabit per second inputs so the way that the splitters work and this is true for everybody in the industry currently uh maybe next year it'll be different but currently if you want to do two 8k uh displays at the same time you have to do it off of a single source off of one of these three if you want to do 8k to the main zone and 8k to the second zone with two different sources you're out of luck and this is again true for everybody industry ak only to the main zone a different source to zone two will go down to 4k that's just the nature of single chip solutions at this time so you know going forward in the future that may definitely change right on uh then we go into the 7100 which is uh also featuring imacs not just drac but imax as well so imax enhanced uh which is kind of like you know it's it's imax and dts's version of thx i guess that'd be one way of thinking of it there's a lot more to it than that but but uh just as thx tests everything to make sure that there's no uh degradation nothing added or nothing taken away from the audience video pathways and the amplifier can is up to scratch imax takes that to in a whole other direction but a phenomenal direction uh for those of you that haven't really familiarized yourself with that in a nutshell is they work very closely on a video and audio uh side of things with the content creators themselves so if the audio engineer and the cinematographer are available they'll work with them to take that gigantic imax theater experience and rescale it not just for the audio but also the visual impact for a much smaller home theater screen or projector because obviously you know most people don't have a 200 foot imac screen in their homes they have like a 200 inch by max screen in their homes so in a theater the grain level uh for just one example of many the grain that's in a film that's being shown in a 200 foot imac screen that could be overwhelming on a smaller screen in someone's home so they reprocess the film to recalibrate all the elements of the original film stock so that you get the best impact in the home environment not just for audio as well but that's it in a nutshell uh back panel here uh we've got three zones of course all powered um so up to three different sources playing back in three different rooms at the same time as well as detachable power cord rs-232 for control and legacy video inputs like component and composite when we go to integra we have some interesting differences not the least of which is every single feature in function and control is available on the faceplates of integrators again it's it's ci oriented so you know when you're setting up and configuring in a rack or a custom cabinet that remote control is going to go missing so you want to be able to have instant access to every uh feature and function that receiver right off the faceplate so quick question so the 6100 is the top of the line uh on the occu well yes you know 7 the regular onkyo line if you will then we have our rz line which i couldn't find a slide of in time for this but uh uh the rz is kind of like a um an integrator line of onkyo products similar to to integra with not quite as many bells and whistles but really mostly for distributors that cater to the installer market one of the big differentiators between integra and all the other brands out there that we're working with is this back panel which obviously is is different it's white background with black text versus black background and white text and the big advantage of this again is as an integrator if you're working in a uh a dark equipment closet having this extra reflectivity this extra light reflectivity of a white background panel will make things a little bit easier to figure out what you're plugging into where and make your your life as an installer a little bit easier and those it's these little things that add up for a better experience for the installer and of course more 12 volt triggers ins and outs and all that kind of stuff uh 3.4 this is uh something that that rob in particular is very proud of um one of the not to make a long story short but you know again differentiation between the brands trying to figure out what can we add what can we take away to make one model from one particular brand really stand out and of course adding pre-outs to the 3.4 in particular was a big win for us across the board because as i'm sure many people on this call know the ability to be able to swap out amplifiers for main use or distributed audio used throughout the house that's a very essential tool to have that kind of flexibility on the receiver yeah i i love pre-outs on a receiver that's that's yeah because you can add more subwoofers right yeah well you can it just makes it so flexible yeah it does and again you know we it's your system we want you to be able to do what you want with it then we go to the 5.4 that's thx select certified mole power more flexibility just a lot more bigger power supply more amperage i think it's like a 45 amp power supply on board this this one is pretty huge uh we'll go to elite totally different look and feel to a different uh feels like elite right there it does doesn't it yep so two zone 305 is a 9 channel so a 3 zone now again this is the 305 which a lot of people would would mistake looking at the back panel for the 3.4 from integra but we are completely lacking those pre-outs those multi-channel pre-ops and we have fewer 12-volt triggers as well too on the uh all the brands compared to integra here's the 505 i've actually got one sitting next to me in my office right now that i experiment with and try to break on a daily basis and here we have 11 channel pre-ops just like the 5.4 in the integra uh the rz50 also has 11 channel pre-out so just to clarify this is a nine channel uh amplifier but it has an 11 channel dsp uh so you know for cost savings purposes we didn't put an 11 channel amplifier in it so at this particular the price points we're looking at for the the uh nine channel models in the upper end uh you can add an external two channel amplifier and get a full 11 channel surround sound yeah so you can do like 7.x.4 exactly makes good sense all right so rob you're up take it away calgon well one one question sorry i just have to ask is there a plan on any of the product lines to move beyond the 11 channels other than the the subwoofer out for for a top-end unit so do you ever have a vision down the line where you'll be able to support something like nine bed channels and four or six at most channels oh there's there's always plans giles there's always plans but rob can tell you we uh sometimes talk a little bit too freely and that comes around and bites us in the butt so let's let's just tell everybody today or tonight wherever you happen to be that we're always looking uh over the horizon and trying to uh we've got plans but no that and that's enough for me that's from my point of view exciting that's cool awesome all right rob this time it really is is back no no i think uh i think that about does it for me for i mean so we're we're uh we're in half an hour over i know we're still in the first segment of the show yeah it's um 11 30 p.m eastern time i think yeah i think we're gonna fast-pace some of this and maybe skip the content corner this week but i do want to take five or ten minutes and close out the episode um by answering a tech question of the week so let me let me see if i can do a little thing here we go [Music] now it's time for the tech question of the week and it's sponsored by akio and by sponsored i just mean they showed up to talk oh and the tech question is um let me let me actually get to my notes so i can read it how do you optimize your home theater audio experience in particularly from a onkyo point of view i mean so you know you've got a a receiver you got all these speakers and stuff but what you know what are some of the steps somebody might go through to really get this you know as good as it possibly could be for them well rob went to ny university for for audio so that's the start work on get a bachelor's degree in acoustics acoustic engineering all right we're good with that but outside of that what would somebody do i mean it's is really you know using direct kind of the the right tool set that you know people would want to avail themselves of uh to to work on that or oh sure yeah there's a number of things you do i mean just just simply right out of the box uh understanding a little bit more than you might you know do a little bit of research uh when when you're assembling your system the number of speakers you're going to be having in your listing position is try to get an idea of where in theory optimal positions for these speakers might be so for example a subwoofer you don't want that in the middle of the floor in the room because i think you'll trip over it but uh you know try to do a little bit of research first to you know go on the forums go on the the the youtube dealers and see what other people are talking about recommending in terms of like speaker position and placement because your room is really a big giant speaker cabinet at the most elemental level so your room is the biggest influencer of the sound that you're going to get and if you want to improve your sound take a look around you and and think about where problem areas that room might be maybe there are highly reflective surfaces like you know hardwood floor with no area rugs or anything like that things that you might want to do to help absorb a little of the higher frequencies and redirect some of that sound so it's it's not as bright or as harsh at the listening position and then once you've you've gotten a few of the basic steps down then you can go to tools like drac to optimize everything in that room because most people like me in particular if you were to see my home theater space you'd freak out because in the early 80s singles family home construction that i've got home theater was not even an idea in the architect's dream so all the doors windows and air conditioning returns are in all the wrong places so i i literally am forced to sit off center from my tv uh and my home my speakers so it's it's really bizarre but thanks to to things like d-rack you know you can hook up the microphone and it will run in a really advanced set of test tones and get a really good feel of what that acoustic space is and what those speakers are capable of doing in that space and in particular one of the things that really makes drac shine compared to other room tuning solutions out there is their patented impulse response detection and that can be very complicated looking at on paper and on graphs to figure out what the heck impulse response is all about but really what it is is it's a two-fold calibration process the impulse response is the key because you want to know what that speaker is actually capable of doing before the acoustics of the room screw up that signal so that's where the impulse comes into so when it runs the test tones it listens to and is able to detect the frequencies being generated by those drivers on those speakers before the room reacts to those frequencies and then it listens to the way the room is interacting with those frequencies and that's where that cloud computation comes in and that's why it's really uh above and beyond what a receiver processor could handle because there's so much information that's dealing with it's dealing with exactly the frequencies that that speaker can reproduce then the frequencies that the room is creating from those it's expanding upon and distorting and it puts those two measurements together and comes up with a solution that really kind of makes the room disappear and makes the speaker stand out the way it's supposed to it was designed to sound that's cool yeah so it it you know it's goal is to really repair the sound so that whatever bad things that room is doing you know it that goes away and you're just left with the experience yeah remove the room from the equation and that's what direct does amazingly well right awesome well thank you so much and we're way over i thank you so much for for your time and everybody out there in audience land thanks uh thanks for your time too i know there are a lot of questions that we didn't get to but that just means that we have to do this again one day so that we can work through all those maybe we'll just have a day of questions only oh but uh but you know rob roth thank you so much look forward to having you guys again one of these days to chat with myself and everybody else that's out there in the world and to all you folks out there in the world thanks for joining us um i really appreciate the time the opportunity oh absolutely absolutely you know next week we'll be back again with another great episode make sure to like and subscribe i'll have all the links down uh in the notes of this i'm gonna get with robin roth and uh and get all of their ideas ideas around where they would send people to to get additional information for the things that we've talked about and i'll make sure that's posted up so you can check that out in the coming days so with that putting a fork in it thank you guys happy birthday one more time man all right thank you so much rob i appreciate it take care everybody see you guys in the next video thank you thanks everybody out there

Channel: Home Theater Fanatics

Views: 9,566

Keywords: home theater, onkyo receiver, dolby atmos, which av receiver is better, new onkyo receiver, onkyo home theater receiver, home theater setup, onkyo home theater system, new onkyo receivers, home theater sound system, home theater ideas, onkyo receiver setup tx-sr393, onkyo tx-rz50, onkyo, integra, pioneer, pioneer elite, thx

Id: 3ath4y8Cr8I

Length: 87min 43sec (5263 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021