[brosinante]

"personally, I have a second hand denon HDMI decoder thing, with airplay [..] dsp filtering [..] calibration stage [...] decent flat reproduction"

These are certainly words, and everything else being the same I absolutely would rather have the "bit wooly" kind of review to read.

[KaiserPro]

i see what you did there! also point taken.

In my defence, "decent flat reproduction" is at least measurable. However I should have actually been much more precise in my language. It should have read something like "the frequency response across the full spectrum is flat, which means that what you put in is what comes out, there is no extra base or treble, despite the shape and sound performance of the room"

[Naracion]

Is the microphone embedded? If not:

Should be qualified by "since the mic is on the receiver, if you were to situate your head at the receiver's mic position and accounting for the mic's ADC circuit there is a chance that your human ears would hear something like a flat response."

But of course that can't be generalized across the room, different points in the room will have different acoustic response because of the unique positioning wrt other reflective surfaces.

The closest you can actually get is to use something like miniDSP and a umik, position the umik where you would usually sit, and then let the DSP run and calibrate.

Anyhow--I'm not knocking you. I'm all about better audio through such tricks as well. It's just we can't probably say absolute things having a flat response, because at the end of the day people hear different things (both physiologically but also psychologically). One of the things I do for fun sometimes is run a flat signal that sweeps through the frequency range and edit the equalizer until I _perceive it_ to be a flat response, then compare the EQ to the FR chart on audiosciencereview if they have reviewed it or if the product has included it in their marketing :)