Scheer Home Theater Systems Portfolio

Anthem Statement D1 Surround Sound Controller, Audiophile Preamplifier, and Home Theater A/V Control Center

Author: Brian Florian - www.hometheaterhifi.com | Source: statement.anthemav.com

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This is where the rest of the industry was behind the AVM-20, and for the most part, no one's caught up. Both the AVM-20 and D1 are arguably the most complete SSPs on the market, yet if you ask any owner what they love most, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is, "It's so easy to use . . . it does exactly what I want".

Naturally, time alignment gets set just the way we like it: By inputting the distance to each and every speaker in the home theater system, in 0.5 foot increments. The AVM-20 introduced a new concept here which is carried into the D1: Specifying whether the surrounds are Dipolar or Direct. If you specify DiPole here, the D1 reduces the amount of delay applied because the sound of dipoles is thought to arrive "later" since it travels first to the boundaries of the room and then to our ears. From what we understand, this idea was run past THX and got their approval. We originally liked the idea but in the meantime, having consulted with Dolby, I'm encouraging you to first try the Direct setting, even if you have DiPoles. While it is true that much of a dipole's sound is reflected, some sound does come right from the enclosure. Depending on the acoustics of your room, that first direct sound may be of sufficient power and timber as to make conventional delay settings the appropriate choice.

Each input has its own setup menu. Each can be renamed to anything you like up to six characters, can have any digital input assigned to it, or may be designated as analog, in which case you'll chose between converting it to digital or bypassing everything the D1 has to offer and leave it as analog (more on this later). Each input may have a global delay applied to it, in range of 0-170 ms, and each has an input gain, as well as its own unique Bass and Treble settings.

In the case of digital, a given input can be set to use short, medium, or long muting. This is not referring to the general "Mute" button on the remote, rather it is the inherent mask of a digital audio system pending data stream lock. With some equipment and/or data types, the "short" setting may produce a "snap" or "pop" at the start of a stream (which includes chapter skipping because technically, that is an interrupt and restart of the stream). We found that the default for DVD players, the "Medium" setting, proved to have a small snap at the start of a DTS 24/96 stream with one particular DVD player (but it worked fine with any and all other digital audio formats). Changing this setting to the "Long" setting (the default for DSS systems), solved the problem at a slight cost of lock-on time.

Each input has six signal formats to which default playback modes may be assigned:

• 2 Channel
• 2 Channel Dolby Digital
• Dolby Digital 5.1 (including 4.0, 4.1, and 5.0)
• Dolby Digital EX
• DTS 5.1
• DTS ES

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