Thanks to the discussion a few pages back on REW/Audyssey, I stumbled across something from Denon on AVSForum that is 100% opposite of how Schiit approaches things. Apparently, in 2022, someone using REW discovered Denon used an incorrect calculation for the speed of sound in Audyssey (300m/s vs 340m/s) which resulted in incorrectly measured speaker distances and therefore incorrect room corrections. Ruh roh! Denon eventually fessed up and corrected it in 2022 and later models. The crap thing is that they did not issue any firmware updates for older systems, despite doing so would be trivial, making a BS and lame statement about processors not able to calculate etc. that was simply not true. Mine is a ~2018 model that received updates through 2022, so this is especially irksome and wouldn't have cost them anything. Worse, their recommendation was for users to pay US$199 for the full Audyssey app which has the correction already baked in!
Luckily, a simple fix is to take the incorrect distance numbers and multiply them by .875 and manually enter them. I will think twice before buying another new Denon/Marantz amp given this poor response to flawed software with a clear negative impact that should have been easily and quickly fixed. I played some music before the calculation change and after, and the difference was noticeable, like when an optometrist switches testing lenses during an eye exam: one is definitely clearer and sharper than the the other. Not by a lot, but it's there.
Late this morning a close friend came by. He's a trained classical musician who back in the day was one of the few students taken on by the same professor who trained Wynton Marsallis. This is all to say that he has a good ear. I wanted to get another set of ears on my system because my ears aren't perfect, tinnitus and all. He had heard my setup before with an earlier and poorer Audyssey configuration and thought it "OK-ish". I also hadn't had the Gungnir Multibit, Freya N with the PSVANE Horizon tubes, and the Lokius in the chain last time. This time we set the speakers back to to 2.1 mode with my mid-tower Wharfedales being the main speakers and again played his reference tracks while he sat in the prime listening spot. He said the stage, clarity, and space between instruments and voices was the best he's heard, and he noted the realism in the cymbals, and the percussive sounds as guitar players played their chords. Vocal reproduction really impressed him. He had noted the realism when the Schiit components were in the headphone stack and those components, combined with my attention to the room, brought it all together.
There's more I want to do, but I think I might be getting into diminishing returns territory.
<edited to correct typos>
