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Photograph courtesy of Pioneer
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By WILSON ROTHMAN
One of the biggest benefits of DVD is the sound — not only do the discs offer better-than-CD sound quality, but most of them these days come with a six-speaker surround-sound mix, to emulate the movie theater experience. The trouble is, it's up to you to configure the subwoofer plus the center-channel, front left and right, and back left and right speakers. You probably don't have a degree in acoustical engineering, and you probably don't have a living room that conforms to the set-up described in manuals (you in the center of a perfect circle surrounded by speakers placed with DaVinci-like radial symmetry). Pioneer's VSX-D912 doesn't burden you with the set-up: it lets you put speakers wherever you have to, and then re-calibrates them for better surround sound.
The procedure (called "multi-channel acoustic calibration") only takes three minutes, and it's kind of entertaining. You plug in the microphone that came with the unit, and carry it to your couch (don't worry, the wire is at least 15 feet long). Once you activate the self-test, it starts hissing and clicking, checking both the relative volume levels of each speaker, and the distances of each speaker to you and your mic. It stops as abruptly as it began. You should notice that you can now hear all parts of the movie's soundtrack more clearly: no speaker is too loud or too soft relative to another. If you decide to rearrange the furniture, or if you feel like the La-Z-Boy is a better seat, just run the procedure again.
The receiver does a lot more — it has a variety of cool virtual surround-sound modes for regular CDs and even VHS movies, and enough inputs for not just DVD player and CD player, but cable or satellite box, TiVo, CD-R recorder and more. My only real gripe — which could just be with myself — is that the wiring was more complicated than anything I've used before. Because it takes up to eight speakers — sold separately — I wired two of them in the wrong place and got a little frustrated. Now that everything is in the right place, however, the sound is magical.
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