Recently remodeled the room. Added a dedicated 20amp service for the electronics. I also buried the HDMI, surround speaker wire and electrical in the ceiling for additional lighting. The screen floats 12" from the wall and is backlit with blue LED rope lighting. I also found a set of NOS Sony tubes and replaced them myself. This will hold me over for a year or so while more 4k content becomes available. The this projector will be replaced by a 4k digital pj. Any comments welcome.
Thank you for the kind thoughts... I'm glad to hear the 800 is settling into the system well. I think you'll hear more start to emerge after it gets to 300 and over. I think we are on a similar path as I've hit a point where I'm sitting back and enjoying the music (when time allows) much more than obsessing over the system and changing it. Happy listening!
Sorry for the delay in responding; work and a death in the family (my father) have taken me off the boards for a while. How do you like it? I am not contemplating any cross-grades or upgrades...I am extremely happy with where things stand and am focusing on just enjoying the music now that some time to do dedicated listening has returned!
Classe is a step above most if not all companies in how they deal with customers and help you protect your investment. The 300 hour break-in time on my SSP-600 and CP-700 pre-amp is definitely accurate. Between 300 and 500 additional subtleties come out as well. The trick with the 800 (or 600) is to ensure that you break it in on the HT/digital-analog side as well as spend a bit of time breaking it in on balanced bypass (I found this for best results). There is overlap however I found this worked best with the 600.
I did a lot of testing and reporting back of results with the firmware in the 600 for Classe; they were extremely responsive when it came to fixing bugs. I'm sure they'll deal with anything in the 800 in the same manner. They are great to deal with!
Classe still provides five band parametric EQ on each of the ten channels of the SSP-800 with microphone-based measurement, etc... Perhaps things have changed in the last year or so but I never found any unit that automatically EQ'ed a room correctly and consistently when run back to back. I always found that I had to manually adjust things anyway. What I can tell you is that the pre- and post-processing in the Classe Surround Processors I've used has been first rate and sonically, I've not run across anything at lower or higher price points that I've like better. Take this with a grain of salt as personal opinion of course as this stuff is all very subjective!
It's great to hear that the gods are smiling on you. I loved my SSP-600 for so many reasons. If I was still doing HT, I would without a doubt have an SSP-800 in this system for all its latest improvements in the DAC output stages, etc. etc....For an external scaler, without a doubt i would point you towards a Lumagen Radiance processor (for HDMI 1.1 and later compatibility). I've had a VisionHDQ for years (I convert HDMI video to DVI-D as I prefer it) and the scaling, configuration capability and ability to calibrate every aspect of video performance is second to none.
Thank you very much! If you want those decoding options then the SSP-800 is the way to go. I believe I just saw a write-up in TAS in which all the SSP-800's attributes were covered in very good detail. Happy listening!
You could consider keeping the SSP-600 and investing in a killer scaler (Lumagen Vision HDQ or there new one that does HDMI...). If you have the funds for the SSP-800 on the other hand I've heard it is a killer unit.
