I think I prefer Onkyo over HK for movies.

[irvin]

Well I have been meaning to try an HK so I went down to circuit city and borrowed an avr 240 (30 day money back ha ha). I wanted to see how it compared to my Onkyo 502( great little receiver). I was very dissapointed with the HK 240 in the movies area. I think the HK lacked punch that the Onkyo has for DVD's. Now I know what people mean when they say Hk's are laid back. IMO the lack of highs makes movies sound less dynamic. The Onkyo gives my Athena's more pronounced highs than the HK. But for music I prefer the HK over the Onkyo. But I am mostly into movies with my home theater.

[ericgl]

To each his own, but make sure set-up is accurate (on both) before you make your final decision.

[jvgillow]

In my untreated room the "Onkyo" sound with Athena speakers is almost too much without taming the high-end. THX Re-EQ fixes things nicely but that still doesn't help for 2-channel input sources.

I think I need to manually EQ the 7 channels with the built-in 5 band equalizer. Onkyo auto-setup chose EQ presets that pushed the midrange and knocked most of the bass and treble down which is not acceptable in terms of SQ (although it did make the high end less sharp).

[irvin]

I have spent almost 2 weeks calibrating and speaker placement with the HK 240 but I just prefer the Onkyo 502 for movies. But the HK sounds amazing for music especially Logic 7.

[PULLIAMM]

I have an Onkyo TX8511 stereo receiver in my music system. It sounds good to me with all of the speakers I have used it with so far. With Athenas, I did turn the treble control down a notch.

[ncfoster]

I have an Onkyo 602 and Athena AS fronts (F1.2s and a C1.2), and I was wondering what the consensus is as far as the EQ goes, both generally and with Athenas. I had previously left the EQ setting on "Auto", but I just switched it to "Off".

My reasoning for doing so is that I don't know anything about how the auto setting works. Is it just some pre-set that gives the "Onkyo sound"? Is it based on some other variables, such as the speaker-size and crossover values, or perhaps it gathers some info from the inckluded setup mic? While I'm not sure where I fall exactly on the processed vs. un-processed sound debate, I feel better about using unprocessed sound than sound processed by some unknown process.

Is the proper way to figure out all of this to use one of those setup DVDs and an SPL?

Nathan