Calibrating surround sound setup

quokula

I recently set up my living room with a Yamaha RXA680 wired up to centre, left and right speakers and connecting to MusicCast wireless speakers for rear right, rear left and subwoofer.

I’m mainly using it with a PS5 and Xbox Series X that are hooked up by HDMI. The Xbox is set to 5.1 uncompressed and the PS5 is just set to 5.1 (there don’t seem to be compression options)

I’ve noticed a few issues, the big one being that the dialog in games often plays with an echo, like each character is speaking twice, once in front of me and once behind. In general gameplay it’s fine but I find it’s games that go to a close up talking head type of scene that this seems to happen with.

I got the same issue with the intro of squid game on Netflix where the narrator talks over the kids playing the game had a major echo (while the kids talking are totally fine) - I found I could tune this out and get it sounding ok by setting the rear speakers to -8.0db - however that same setting seems to have done nothing to help when playing games (I haven’t had the issue in a place in a game where I can keep repeating it the way I can with Netflix so it’s harder to figure out with trial and error)

A second issue is that when I try YouTube on either console, and try the various surround sound test videos that I thought might help me understand things, none of them actually play any sound except on the front speakers. Google gives me conflicting information about whether the YouTube app should work or not, on xbox at least I think it’s supposed to work but it’s no different to PlayStation for me

I also tried watching succession on Now TV and find the dialog very quiet, to hear it well I have to turn the volume up to levels that louder scenes with music or sound effects are far too loud. I don’t know if this is just the nature of the program or if it’s doing the same as the YouTube app and not playing sound from certain speakers leading to it being too quiet.

I’ve probably spent way too much money on this system without really knowing what Im doing, I kinda expected it to just be plug and play but right now the various issues just distract me and ruins immersion and make me want to go back to TV speakers, at no point so far has it felt like an improvement.

Does anyone have good tips or advice or a good guide I could follow to get things set up to a decent level?

njburke

Did your amp come with a setup Mic that allows you to auto setup your system? This feature canvgive a reasonable starting point and flag basic errors like crossed channels and speaker phasing.

Have rrectly wired the correct speaker channel for the speaker in your room? You need to configure the amp to set it up for a 5.1 system. You may have confused surround speakers and rear surrounds.

There is a test tone feature on the amp, it'll play pink noise through each channel sequentially. The active channel will be indicated on the on screen display or tv. Adjust the levels so each channel is similarly loud, maybe set the centre a little higher. The sub if you have one will give a bit of a rumble during its slot on the test tone. Once you know you have five working channels you can move on to checking sources and decoding issues. There is one YouTube that I use to verify my simple 5.1 system. https://youtu.be/_TX--Fku9NQ

reboot

The echo is sometimes caused by the signal being delayed as it goes through a piece of equipment and out again.

Different levels are unfortunately here to stay as even BBC radio channels have big level changes between them..

I've asked them about this,the answer was some are music channels and some talk?