First evening trying phantom as home cinema speakers. Simple setup composed of a Panasonic viera plasma TV 60" streaming Netflix (wireless connection). TV optical out into one the 2 phantoms silver (software 1.7.1). Dialogue 2 floors away connected to apple router. Phantoms' network connection is PCM. Room 7m x 4m, TV/Phantoms placed on the long side, 3m apart and 3m from listening position (10° toe-in).
The good: latency has almost disappeared vs last time I tried a couple of months ago. Very clear soundstage. Clear, well defined voices. Good bass.
The question: to get decent volume I am running the Phantoms @95 volume level!
With music 95 would make the house rattle, why is it that the sound level is so low? Am I doing anything wrong?
Any other advice to improve the sound quality of this setup?
Just a guess, but is there a setting in the TVs menu to adjust the sound output?
Thanks. Looked for it but did not find anything. My understanding is that optical out (PCM) does not feature any volume setting, being just a digital signal. Am I getting this wrong?
You certainly have something in the chain that does digital attenuation in the chain. For Phantoms, a volume setup to 70 corresponds to zero dB attenuation, meaning that at 0 dBFS you reach 99 dBA for the white and 105 dBA for the silver.
Maybe you have to put the optical from the TV into the Dialog and not into one of the Phantoms.
Not ideal obviously if your Dialog is 2 rooms away though. I only have 1 Phantom so I don't have a Dialog and i have no issues with volume from my TV which also has no volume control when using optical out.
(29-May-2016, 00:03)GTX Wrote: [ -> ]First evening trying phantom as home cinema speakers. Simple setup composed of a Panasonic viera plasma TV 60" streaming Netflix (wireless connection). TV optical out into one the 2 phantoms silver (software 1.7.1). Dialogue 2 floors away connected to apple router. Phantoms' network connection is PCM. Room 7m x 4m, TV/Phantoms placed on the long side, 3m apart and 3m from listening position (10° toe-in).
The good: latency has almost disappeared vs last time I tried a couple of months ago. Very clear soundstage. Clear, well defined voices. Good bass.
The question: to get decent volume I am running the Phantoms @95 volume level!
With music 95 would make the house rattle, why is it that the sound level is so low? Am I doing anything wrong?
Any other advice to improve the sound quality of this setup?
Check your Panasonic manual for control of the ARC (audio return channel) and the role of the HDMI controls. There is a lot of cross reference discussions on the AV chats on this topic.
GTX check if your TV has a setting like 'Boost volume on downsample'. When a 5.1 signal is down
mixed to stereo the volume comes out lower. Most apps (like Plex for example) will have a setting to raise the volume to handle that.
I have exactly the same setup with a Samsung TV and it works fine. I agree with the statements above you have digital attenuation somewhere in your chain prior to Phantom.