I calibrated Dirac Live within an Arcam AVR 30 AV Receiver with P429 Power Amplifier for a customer with a discrete Dolby Atmos Home Cinema system featuring KEF CI in wall speaker package with Monitor Audio rear speaker, a REL and a Monitor Audio subwoofer and other toys.
The AVR30 had been installed by a dealer who had attempted to run a Dirac Live calibration but ran into problems and couldn’t get it to work, the customer contacted me to do the setup and calibration instead. I talked the customer through the correct firmware update process via email so that when I arrived at the job we were ready to get started with the calibration.
I spent a number of hours working on finding the optimum sound balance for the system, tweaking things and working things out. I concentrated in particular on the centre speaker with this system to ensure the vocals and everything else really came out in the overall sound mix
The customer and his wife use the home cinema a lot, they watch a lot of movies together. It was only right that the customer and his wife do some listening testing after I had finished to make sure they were both happy with the sound. I was chuffed to bits when she said she was hearing specific intricate details in the sound track of her favourite movie The Greatest Showman.
Customers Comments
“After 15 years of multiple evolutions in our living room home cinema, we upgraded our Arcam AVR850 to the flagship AVR30. For us home cinema has to be immersive, both providing detail in resolution & feeling the power & depth of the integrated bass.
The AVR30 out of the box with basic room settings did a great job but was flat compared to our old AVR850 that had Dirac calibration.
Terry did an awesome job of making the AVR30 sing & showcasing the incredible resolution & depth the receiver is capable of on our 7:4:2 Atmos setup.
From emails to the calibration actual visit, Terry was thorough, knowledgable & friendly. He clearly is exceptionally skilled in the area of Dirac & happy to share his advice, spending around 6 hours optimising ours through multiple iterations until he & I were happy. In fact I think Terry was more detail orientated about the quality of the final sound than I, being a perfectionist wanting us to get the most out our system as possible.
We had previously watched Tenet 4K on the setup & struggled to hear the voice audio with only about 10% clarity. After the calibration we re watched & it was a completely new movie with 95% clarity (it’s a tough movie for voice audio as many will know). We’ve also watched many other movies we know well on our setup & heard much more detail than previously.
We would highly recommend Terry as he really knows what he’s doing but more so has a passion for the perfect setup. Every penny was worth it to unleash the power of our latest AV investment”