7-2
Advanced Features Mark Levinson
Patterns of Use
As you live with the system for a while, you may notice certain
patterns of use emerging. For example, you may use the balance
control to add a little emphasis to the surround and subwoofer
channels during action movies to make it more exciting, and then
go back to “normal” balance for music because the exaggerations
no longer appeal to you.
One of the most powerful concepts in the Nº40 is the sound profile.
With it you can easily reconfigure much of the system to suit your
varying needs. We will suggest a few sample sound profiles to help
your imagination, but what is right for you can only really be deter-
mined by you, and your viewing and listening habits.
Action movie
If you enjoy watching action movies (or just want to show off the
new system to some friends), you might want to create an “action
movie” sound profile. It might include:
• A defined listener position that represented a location in the
middle of your seating area,
• A preference for THX processing on multichannel soundtracks
and for THX on two-channel soundtracks
• A few extra decibels on the surround and subwoofer channels
• Dolby Digital Compression would be Off (since you want
maximum impact)
• Using one of the triggers to automatically drop the screen for
your projection television.
Most movies
By contrast, a sound profile for most other movies might look quite
similar but for leaving all the speakers at their calibrated, techni-
cally correct levels relative to one another.
Late night
A “late night” movie setting might be the same as “most movies,”
except Dolby Digital Compression would be set to medium or high
to avoid waking the kids or to provide a more restful movie
watching experience.
2-ch music
If you enjoy listening to a large collection of two channel record-
ings, you may want to create a specific 2-ch music mode that will
reproduce them in their original stereo format. Such a sound profile
would be quite different from the previous ones: