AV9 still no EQ

Makes me feel a little smug, that even now the latest Arcam dosnt appear to have any EQ implementation when Ive had it for over two years

 

Works for me too.

 

more than anything its disappointing that Arcam can't seem to progress, after all at the design stage it would not be that hard to add in a pair of 21161s so some EQ.

 

Was it ever designed with significant hardware upgrades in mind? Unless you have a motherboard style of configuaration these are a right royal pain in the xxxxx to do

 

It is when the standard 21161 software doesn't have room eq in it... or supports two 21161N's! The ARCAM's are based around the Crystal solutions that are dedicated audio DSP's with code supplied by the chip manufacturer that exposes a control interface. ARCAM do the integration bit of configuring the DSP's via this interface, but if the software doesn't support a feature (like Room EQ) then it would be rather tricky for ARCAM to add it.

Most AV manufacturers are in the same position as it's quite expensive to do custom DSP development as you need specialist software staff and all the kit that goes with it. The only UK manufacturer that I know of that does it's own DSP software development is Meridian.

When we did the AV32DP and AV192R at TAG we went half way and had Analog Devices do the core decoders and licencable technologies. We then ported this to our twin DSP platform and then designed and coded the rest, hence giving us a fair bit of control of the feature set and algorithm quality in the product.

 

My smugness just increases further Steve If I remember correctly Arcam had a hell of a job adding PL2x never mind an entire EQ system. Imagine how Udo would have been torn to shreds on the Tag forum if he had said "to bad! we arnt bothering with a HDMI audio input, we are just gonna stick a HDMI video switcher on the back and call it the AV32R DP HD"

 

Thanks for the clarification Stevesky.

Makes me wonder if we'll ever see something akin to the DP or AV192 but at a bit less than Lexicon or Meridians prices, it would be nice to have something to recommend to people at more like Denon or Yamaha pricing but without all the useless Disco, SuperFandangoSurround etc, parametric RoomEQ has real value and works, pity Denon/Yahama/etc haven't figured out that so far their EQ is more akin to graphic than parametric.

Perhaps in another couple of years the market will have caught up with TMA?