Eventhough SC-68 is more powerful than SC-37 and both of them have different Class-D amp (SC-37 has B&O's ICEPower and SC-68 has Pioneer's own), I could not help comapring SC-68 with my sweet boy SC-37. I am trying to avoid as much as possible, but, I had to mention it in some places.
Out of the box
As my photos, SC-68 comes with very well packed box with _adequate_ accessories. It comes with very lite weight remote, AV Navaigator CD, batteries for the remote, iPod audio & video connector cable, loop antena for radio, setup mic and warranty sheet. Instruction manual is soft copy in AV Nav CD itself. No more printed materials.
SC-37 came with whole lot of accessories, like IR blasters, very heavy remote with LCD, iPod cables, antenna and instruction manual.
Looks and connections
Look of SC-68 is awesome. The brushed black aluminium front facia gives more high end look to this beast. I did not like the stickers which read 4K, Class D amp, 3D video etc., It kinda gives cheaper look to the AVR. But, it is only me. I have removed them though
The heat vents for the AVRs are similar to SC-37 and back of the amp is crowded, but yet easy to connect all necessary source and output channels. I felt the subwoofer .2 pre amp outs are little more crampy since, my sub cable connector is thicker (monster). I wonder whether two of the kind can be accommodated.
The rubber feet of the AVR are good and the build quality is excellent. It is definitely heavier than SC-37. On the front, below the display panel, there are hidden controls (covered by a flop). That's where MHL, iPod, MCACC setup mic socket and other controls are present. Overall, very elegant placements of controls, under the flop. On the front, both sides of display panel, same sized knobs are present: one for source select on the left hand side and master volume control knob on the right hand side.
It is one beatiful AVR on the rack for sure, after peeling off the stickers from the front face of AVR
Remote Controller
It is one normal looking remote, unlike SC-37's. It does not appear to be one high end AVRs remote. Just looks like cheap dvd player remote. It does not have RF which was present in SC-37. Yes, it has back light (red color) and no LCD screen on the remote. It has center dial with 4 important control buttons around the center dial. Video parameter, audio parameter, home menu and return button around ceneter dial. Below that are other four important/direct control buttons for Phase, PQLS, Hi-Bit and DAC. Well, it does the job and so no complains
My set-up
- Panasonic Viera TH-P50V20D
- Front - Paradigm Monitor 9 V.6 Towers - Bi-amped
- Center - Paradigm Monitor V.6 CC-290
- Surround and Surround Back - Paradigm Monitor V.6 ADP-390
- Sub Woofer - Klipsch Synergy 10" downfiring (I know, I have to change this guy)
- Pioneer BDP-440 Blu-ray player and Sony PS3
- Asus Oplay Air for streaming and to play HDD content
All my sources are connected thru HDMI to AVR. I don't do video processing for Blu-ray and PS3. I let the source units to do the job. I use AVR's video upscaling and tuning only for Asus Oplay media player content since, all my DVD collections are ripped and stored in my HDD.
SC-68 has two HDMI outputs and HDMI-OUT1 is what I use to connect my Panny. The front height outs are used for bi-amping the front speakers. They should be connected to mid & high of the speakers and front right and left should be connected to bass side of the front speaker for bi-amping, which I did. I connected all the sources to available HDMI ports on the AVR (BDP-440 to dedicated BD HDMI input and the rest to other HDMI ports). That's it, is ready to rock and roll.
Set-up Menu and set-up
So, the first things first. After all the connections, press the home button on the remote the on screen menu appears. I straight away went to manual speaker settings to configure my speakers as 7.2 front bi-amp setup and unset the THX speakers. As usual, the AVRs on-screen menu is only for input and output assignments and amplifier sections - NO special video related on-screen menu.
first item on the menu is Advanced MCACC which takes to auto, manual etc., I connected my set-up mic and calibrated my speaker configuration for the room. My room size is 15 x 15 square room and it took nearly 30 minutes for me to complete fully auto to manual adjustments of speaker level and equlization. In fact, I did not change the individual speaker's channel level at all. I just played around with distance which was calibrated exactly the way it should be, but, I just tried reducing and increasing distances of surrounds which did make difference. Of-course, the EQ was perfect, I played around very little, but, finally I kept it as they were calibrated by MCACC. May be, I need to buy better RTA with scoping to really fine tune the EQ better than what it is. But, I happy with the way it sounds, so, it is untouched by me.
On the video side, for the Oplay source, I have changed resolution to 'Auto' which results in my video to be played in 1080p/60Hz. Also, video display can be selected from PDP, LCD, Projector and memory. In Memory - I can fine tune Hue, saturation, white balance and whole lot of things. I just left to PDP which is programmed for Plasma panel by pioneer.
Performance
Huh, finally! I just played 'Avatar' Blu-ray thru my Pioneer BDP-440. Immediately the PQLS is set to ON since I had kept PQLS in Auto for all the sources. When Jake (his Avatar) is stranded in Pandora at night time, the different sounds of jungle and pack of Pandora's jungle dogs are just as real as if I were there. I had set the Hi-bit to 'ON' (32 bit processing) and DAC to 'Sharp'. When I change the DAC to 'SLOW' from 'SHARP' I did feel little mellowed down audio effect. I did not feel any difference between 'SHARP' and 'SHORT' of DAC though. So, I kept DAC setup as 'SHARP' for Blu-Ray sources. Sound Rtrv is off here. For my Blu-Ray there is no video processing at my AVR. I think the BDP-440 is perfect for Blu-ray. I just enjoyed the movie a whole lot. The sound is definitely crispier, faster and very, very, very controlled. I could say that the sub woofer performance is better with SC-68 than SC-37. Surrounds are more lively with SC-68. The dialogues are cleaner with this EQ setup than SC-37. To test it, I played Dark Knight (which I had watched more than 15 times in SC-37). I feel the vocal/dialogues are definitely better with SC-68. There are some subtle details in Dark Knight when BatMan shoots his string gun, his cape's fluttering noise by the wind - commissioner's (Gary Oldman - a finest actor) mannerisms (heavy breath and some lip twitching) noises are audible/clear.
When it comes to stereo performance, I would say that clarity is taken to different level. I am not using direct audio. I used BDP-440 to play some Jazz and Norah Jones original Audio CD - which I bought from US. Simply amazing. The front stage performance created by my SC-68 is awesome.
Video of this is AVR is phenominal. The color depth is perfect and there is no motion blur with upscaling too. I played Lord Of the rings all six DVDs rip from Oplay Air. I realized that I won't have to buy Blu-Ray of the same. The skin tone, pure black depth and excellent color creation just kept me watching all three movies without adjusting any video details. Awesome.
AV Navigator
Pioneer is just showing off with AVN stuff. It has some nice GUI and I have animated/video user manual as well. This is an integration of all MCACC software and other goodies. I will send the screen shots later. I took printable instruction manual and printed out for reference. Otherwise, you would need your laptop all the time. Did I say laptop, yes, I did. AVN runs only on Windows not on Mac, iPad or Android tabs. So, CD is meant for Windows PCs. Also, thru AVN I can connect to AVR if AVR is on the N/W. I have not done this yet.
Conclusion
Overall, I'm extremely happy with the system. I am yet to read the manual completely. As you all know I'm just spending time over weekend on this baby. I'll keep you posted on certain features details later and if you are interested in knowing certain feature, do post me.
Last but not the least, is it better than SC-37? Well, I'm not really at the stage where I can say that this is better than SC-37. I sure appreciate 9.2/11.2 configuration with SC-68. But, to comment on that I don't have setup of 11.2. So, for 7.2 setup, I think SC-68 may not feel much of an upgrade except the video side of it. Definitely video is better than SC-37 and very controlled performance in audio than SC-37
Lot to explore. I think I will be busy exploring. More later.
hyeah: 
