The Onkyo NR535 plays well

I nearly killed myself carrying the Jamo SUB 260 up the steep hill home, and a day or two later I made the same trip with the Onkyo NR535, which was a few kilos lighter, but my back was beginning to react.

Putting the system together physically was no problem. The same Sony SS-A701's 45-20000 Hz. Unfortunately there was no -3dB or whatever indication on the sheet I had. So things ended up being more manual than I thought it would be, considering the advanced nature of the Onkyo!

The Jamo SUB 260 caused more trouble than it should. Some text to go with the installation diagrams might have helped.

I did a lot of surfing for help on the latter, and was surprised to find little, though that little led me to manual adjustments via Setup which fixed the problem :)

"If it is a negative figure then turn the gain on the sub down a bit and rerun the auto setup. This will mean the amp will send a stronger signal to the sub which should help it to wake up."

The problem?

The SUB worked OK for 20 minutes with the On/off switch in Auto On. You couldn't turn the auto aspect off ! The Automatic Speaker Setup using a microphone at the listening spot did its work, but came up with two errors; it found the SUB to be 33 cm beyond the Front Left instead of 50 cm nearer the listener. Not sure what that contributed to ref the 2nd more important error. It set the SUB level at -5dB. This wasn't enough low frequency umph to trigger the SUB back on after its 20 minute time out even though the SUB was working somewhat right up to the Off point.

So I manually adjusted the subwoofer level in Hardware settings until the SUB reacted at ca +11dB, and then I backed off a touch to +10. Might be able to drop that a touch more after some days experience.

It has been working fine now for an hour or so, banging out Art Blakey drums, and Count Basie big band stuff. Not my favourites, but good test pieces :)

That's it for now. My middle back is still uncomfortable..