Home Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

Re: pro calibration?

24.169.118.201

All you have proved so far is that the tuner in your TV and your DVD player outputs are quite different from one another. Unless your TV supports different calibrations for different inputs (or your DVD player allows its outputs to be calibrated to match the TV tuner), you aren't going to get the DVD player and the tv tuner to look the same no matter how much you pay someone to calibrate you.

Your only way out of this predicament (and it is a COMMON predicament) is to get a new TV that allows custom setting of contrast, brightness, color and tint for each video input. Otherwise you have to pick your poison... bad looking DVD or bad looking TV tuner.

It actually sounds like you did just fine with the video setup.

I'm not sure how you mess up the audio setup to make the sound worse though. Here are some tips:
1) Do not set any speakers to "small" unless they are REALLY small or you will lose sound quality because of the additional filter most receivers insert in the signal path.

2) With all the speakers set to "0 dB" in your speaker level setup menu, let the noise signal go around the room while you look for the speaker with the highest reading. Set the main volume control so that the loudest speaker is 70 dB on your Radio Shack meter. Then adjust the other speakers up to 70 dB using the indovidual adjustments.

3) When using the Radio Shack meter, you must be seated at the listening/viewing position. Hold the meter 1 foot or so in front of you, aimed at 45 degrees to the ceiling. And turn it towards the speaker you are measuring while maintaining that 45 degree upward tilt.

4) Be sure the RS meter is set to "C weighting" and "slow" response for these measurments.

5) Don't forget to turn "LFE on" if you have an LFE subwoofer.

6) Don't forget to measure the distance from the listener/viewer to each speaker and to set the distance for each speaker correctly. Sometimes the center channel is closer than the main speakers and the soundfield will sound better if you have the mains set to (for example) 8 feet and the center set to 7 feet if it is indeed at 7 feet rather than 8 feet. Don't guess at the speaker distances. Measure them accurately.

7) Getting the subwoofer setup right can take some doing. Using the test tones in the receiver alone may not be good enough, you may need to play music with significant bass content and use the music to assist you with various subwoofer settings to get the subwoofer to integrate with the main speakers as well as possible. The receiver test tones won't reveal this since they drive only 1 speaker at a time. You need to hear the subwoofer and main speakers all together in order to get the integration settings done well. Generally you will want to listen for the loudest bass when changing polarity or phase settings on the subwoofer... if the bass level goes down when you make changes, that indicates that there is cancellation happening between the main speakers and subwoofer... that should be avoided.


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