Anthem ARC - Well, it's not that great.

An interesting topic is brought up above, which is what all the extra speakers are for. Are they for effects or immersion?  This argument was compeltely dominated by Dolby in the days of Dolby Surround (i.e. ProLogic for the home buyers).

Dolby Surround was 100% aimed at effects. Wow factor. The internal steering mechanism prevented mixing engineers from even attempting subtle immersive audio environments. They encouraged fly over type of effects, oddly sometimes always going in one direction. Alternative decoders IMHO may do a better job for that 2-channel multiplexed era of movie experience.

Today in the era of discrete channels and now even object based audio encoding this capability has finally been wrested from the electrical engineers and put back into the hands of the mixing engineers where it belongs.

That is not to say movies are better mixed, they are not always, but I think the chance of having spectacular audio environments has certainly come a long way.

@erik_squires , The primary goal of the processor’s auto-cal is to set the distances/levels for speakers, subs, deploy any RSC filters correctly as it sees fit, etc. You will need to make manual fine refinements to distances/levels further from the ballpark it set it to.

The software’s goofy output for auto-eq is for an entry-level user. EQ will need to done manually for the hifi ear. He will go to town with it & adjust to taste as it works for his ears. Yamaha permits a full manual adjustment for multi-band PEQ. Sound United - Denon/Marantz used to provide full manual GEQ control (not sure if they’ve moved up to PEQ yet), etc.....Not sure why Anthem wouldn’t permit that?! I don’t know, i’ve never had an Anthem product.

When you’re taking a multi-point measurement with your cal mic, focus on the primary sweetspot and don’t deviate any additional mic locations from within a foot of the primary sweet spot. Moving the mic around over a larger span (compromising the main sweet spot) may be acceptable to HT guys for movies. If music is the goal, keep it around the primary sweet spot for you. Any other spots can be deemed mother-in-law spots and are not required to sound fabulous.

Ensure that the bedlayer surround speakers are physically at the same distance as the fronts. One can’t keep em 2 ft away from the ears because the room’s the size of a closet and hope the magic delays will fix everything.

If your 5 bedlayer speakers hit low and fall in the hi-fi category, sub positions are sub-optimal, etc, run bedlayer speakers full range (don’t bass-manage/high pass) and dovetail/blend the subs in. Some brands have terrible implementations of bass management. This is all done very well in some brands and not others. It takes a lot of patience, research, focused thought, comprehension, listening, multiple trials and effort to get to a high fidelity multichannel rig (it isn’t as simple as stereo). If not, everyone would have done it by now.

The end goal is to be sitting enveloped in a seamless dome of sound with no individual speaker even being remotely localizable. If one doesn’t have the room for it, he doesn’t and that's about it. There are many tools in object based audio prepros to get you only so far...They can’t fix a chaos room.

@deep_333 FYI, I spent years in the motion picture audio industry. :)

The thing the Anthem does really well is set relative distances and levels.  The EQ sucked and was not fixable. :)