Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased my VSX-LX503 directly from Amazon and have had it installed in my AV room for over a week. It replaced a 7.1-channel Pioneer VSX-1122. The 1122 worked fine, but I wanted two additional amplified channels, plus the Atmos feature. The 1122 does have the earlier Dolby front “height” function, and I had high-mounted front-wall height speakers and back-surround speakers. However, with the VSX-LX503 now in operation I have not bothered to install two more back “height” speakers, settling for a 7.1.2 arrangement, even though those can be employed. (With the 503 you need an outboard stereo amp hooked up to line-level outputs on the rear panel to power those for a 7.1.4 arrangement.) The VSX-1122 unit’s 7-channel feature did not allow for both sets (front-height and back-surround) to be run simultaneously. My satellite arrangement also has a pair of flanking conventional surrounds installed: nine satellites, total, plus two subwoofers. All of the speakers in the AV room were built by me from scratch. I was an audio writer off and on for over 30 years (four books, over 150 magazine articles, plus editing a recorded sound encyclopedia), and so I know how speakers are supposed to sound. And I am adept enough at cabinet building and crossover designing for the results to be equal to any commercially made speakers I auditioned and reviewed over those years. I have two audio systems at my place, with the den, music-only system (3400 cubic-foot room) featuring Allison speakers that I have refurbished and upgraded over the years. (Yes, it is possible to upgrade an Allison speaker.) I will admit that they are marginally better than the speakers in the AV system (2900 cubic-foot room), but not by much. Both installations make use of tall, cylinder-style, outboard-powered subwoofers (two in each rig) made by me and flat-responding to 20 Hz. The den music-only system utilizes a second VSX-1122 receiver, and for its DPLIIz music-mode work I cannot imagine any processing and amplifying device that could do better, at least after careful adjustment. Because of its musical usefulness, the 1122 unit replaced in the AV room by the new VSX-LX503 will go into storage here as a backup should the den unit bite the dust in the future. You never know when lightening might strike. The 503 has a zillion features (listed within its on-line manual and on web-page ads), including many input options and an impressive style, and more than enough amplifier power (especially with outboard subwoofers assisting) to fill all but a huge room with plenty of clean sound. With a bit of background info behind us, let’s get on with analyzing certain characteristics, eccentricities, and foibles. FIRST, the MCACC set-up program in the VSX-LX503 is much less comprehensive than the one with the 1122 receiver. That older one had multiple execution options, including one, called “front align,” that allowed the owner to not EQ the left and right main speakers, with the procedure then mimicking their frequency response with the center and surrounds. That would keep any problems with a cheap microphone from screwing things up, provided, of course, that the left and right mains were smooth responding to begin with. Instead, with the 503, only one EQ option is available and it basically equalizes all the speakers for the smoothest response. You are at the mercy of the microphone. As best I can tell that dedicated microphone did OK and the speakers seem reasonably smooth, although they were pretty smooth to begin with. I did a quick response check in that room of the left, center, and right mains using my AudioControl SA3051, 1/3-octave RTA with a stereo pink-noise feed, and they were fine before and after EQ, so I assume that very little EQ had been applied to them. I did detect a bit of elevation at 4 kHz, and to correct that I went in and dialed back that bump with about minus 2 dB of correction with the MCACC manual mode with the three front speakers. SECOND, setting the satellites to either LARGE or SMALL (the latter to keep low bass from overwhelming small woofers) was weird. With the VSX-1122 you would tell it (using the on-screen prompts) if your satellites had large or small woofers, and then run the program - with the unit behaving accordingly. However, the VSX-LX503 does the EQ with no such preparation. Once complete, a check of the result showed that it treated all of my speakers as large (even the small surrounds) and THEN I was given the option of choosing the size of the speakers. It then made follow-up adjustments for subwoofer usage and the crossover frequency, with the three significant options being 50, 80, and 100 Hz. I chose 80 Hz, which works best with the small woofer in my nine satellite speakers. The approach does work, but the menu shown on the TV is sketchy and inferior to that for the VSX-1122, and there is also little said about this within the 176-page on-line owner's manual. You make the changes on one menu page and then have to go to another menu to see the results. This receiver is so new that it almost seems as if whoever wrote the manual did not know about some of its characteristics. The 1122’s on-line owner’s manual is also MUCH better written. THIRD, with the VSX-1122, after you did the MCACC set up you could access the results with its MCACC “data-check” menu to look at the calculated speaker distances and output levels - and also the EQ applied to each speaker. With the EQ check the TV screen actually showed a frequency response graph for each satellite with the corrections illustrated. With the VSX-LX503, although I could hear subtle EQ being applied during the MCACC operation and the menu indicated that the full set-up work was completed, when I went to its MCACC “data-check” readout page to view the graphic results there were NO adjustments shown on the various graphs for each channel! At first I thought the EQ had not taken hold. Luckily, when reading the on-line manual I discovered that the individual graphs ONLY show adjustment made if the user manually makes adjustments. The corrections made with the automatic function DO NOT show up!! I made a phone call to the Pioneer help desk, and, yep, that is what we have. This is ridiculous, because I would like to see just what kind of corrections were applied by the EQ programming. All the graph readouts allow me to do is apply manual edits, but with no way to tell just what kind of EQ had already been applied. I found to be both weird and frustrating. This anomaly was sheepishly verified by the Pioneer help-desk rep. A bit of internet research tells me that this Pioneer receiver is basically a cosmetically restyled Onkyo TX-RZ730 or 830 receiver with some Pioneer MCACC features tacked on, but only a few of them - and even those appear to have been done haphazardly. There may be technical constraints that were involved (perhaps the Onkyo platform had so many other digital features that its processor lacked the space for all but the most basic Pioneer MCACC emendations), and possibly some economic ones, too. FOURTH, the VSX-1122 allows the user to initiate multiple MCACC set-up runs, putting each of them into each of six “memory presets.” Hence, one could have one for movies (the basic set-up results for Dolby Digital and DTS sources) and one for music, and of course the user could have different MCACC presets for different seating locations. Not so with this unit. All I found was ONE set of MCACC setting options. Consequently, the only way to edit the soundstaging when listening to CD music is to use one of the many environmental simulation modes. Unfortunately, most of those overpower the surround channels. Fortunately, there are at least two mode options that work decently for the kind of small-ensemble baroque-era recordings I enjoy: the Autosurround option would deliver two stereo channels up front, with the subwoofer. For small-space simulations this worked OK, but I still prefer some center-derived image stabilization and some surround ambiance. The other option is the “DSur” setting, which turns on ALL of the satellites and the subs, with the levels of the surround speakers not overly loud, and with them creating a decent hall simulation. Unfortunately, the actual processing involved is mysterious. This second option is NOT as effective as what I could get with the VSX-1122 after adjusting any of its six preset memories. In addition, the 1122 offered several DPLIIz and DTS music playback options that could themselves be fine tuned for some excellent results. Not so with the 503: the DPLIIz music-mode processing is not listed. However, with serious two-channel CD listening the overall results with the 503 were workable, and, well, I listen to most music in my den music system, with the system in the AV room mainly for movies. The other ambiance-simulation choices might be OK for certain kinds of music, or sports games, or even talk shows, but they are of little interest to me, and most were technical overkill. It is obvious that this VSX-LX503 receiver was designed mainly for home theater, and of course that is fine for me, because I have my den system for music. I think that Onkyo, which is the dominant force within the Onkyo/Pioneer merger, figures that those who listen to music might opt for the “direct” or “pure-direct” stereo-only modes, anyway, and those are two of the options. Some people are loathe to listen to CD music in any way other than straightforward CD stereo, and this receiver can deliver those goods with electro-acoustic perfection. One major plus is that many of the VSX-LX503 functions can be controlled from the unit's front panel, a step up from the 1122. The notations on the remote and the front panel are also more intuitive and easier to read than what we had with the older receiver. Also, the remote control for the unit is less fussy to operate than the one on the 1122. In addition, setting the tuner presets was much easier with the 503 than with the 1122, and the tuner works fine. The VSX-LX503 offers an MCACC-labeled phase-integration operation for the subwoofer/satellite interface that is effectively superfluous. Over the years I have reviewed a lot of subwoofers (and built several), and I never found it necessary to diddle with the phase control on any of them. Unless a subwoofer or satellite amp inverts phase (or the satellite woofers are wired backwards) a phase-correction feature in a receiver or processor is pointless. Fortunately, the 503 makes it easy to disable the phase-correction feature by pressing a button on the front panel. Its limitations notwithstanding, I am mostly satisfied with the VSX-LX503. It is easy to see that Onkyo possibly figured that the earlier Pioneer designs offered too many set-up and use options for the average user to deal with. Consequently, they radically simplified the MCACC function to take esoteric selection options out of the user's hands. Ironically, they left some explanations out of the user's manual that would help to rationalize their choices and make it easier for the owner to navigate the options that are there. There are some features that go beyond what the earlier unit offered, like the ability to measure from three different locations during set up, to better smooth out standing-wave artifacts, but on the whole they have built a unit oriented toward more neophyte users than what Pioneer had done previously. I will finally note that the unit is loaded with wi-fI, Bluetooth, and interfacing options that will wow some geeks, but are meaningless to me. I do appreciate the two new channels (the movie-surround performance is impressive) and Atmos-configured Bluray discs (a few of which I already own) were sonically impressive. There appears to be some controversy concerning the so-called Dolby-Atmos speaker systems with their upward-facing Atmos drivers, but this is not the place to get involved with that issue. Suffice to say that adding two Atmos channels up front does subtly enhance movie soundtracks that can still be impressive without the Atmos feature. I consider the results as a perk and not essential. I may later add an outboard amp and two more speakers for a 7.1.4 arrangement, and then I might change my tepid opinion of Atmos. Update: A couple of months later I did add an outboard power amp (a miniature type that is powerful enough) and two more speakers, upgrading to 7.1.4. The new speakers are on the rear wall, high up, and the result is at best only a modest improvement over 7.1.2. I remain reasonably impressed with Atmos and DTS-X, and continue to be amazed with what DTS Neural-X can do with 5.1 and 7.1 soundtracks. Howard Ferstler