[commuteman]

Thanks for the nice welcome!

I've had the Cary for a week or so, and I did say I would come back with initial impressions so here goes:

The build quality is obviously very high, and the C12 feels really substantial ans solid. The controls all have a great feel to them, and it's clearly a high-end product. The packaging and documentation make it clear that this is still something of an artisanal product; everything has a handmade vibe (in a good way..).

The setup is pretty straightforward, but the manual isn't as helpful as it could be. For example, there are two different configs for movies and music, which I will use down the road, but there is no clear indication how they are selected or when you would use them. I found the answer while playing with the remote... The manual does step you through everything that you need to do to get up and running, but it doesn't provide much info about why you might want to choose this option vs that, or what will happen if you do. If you are looking for simplicity and great documentation, and you are not comfortable with a "some assembly required" experience, then this may not be the product for you.

I ignored the auto setup process, since all it does is identify the speaker channels that are present, work out the distance (and hence delay) from each speaker to the listening position, and set the levels. Since I own a tape measure and a sound level meter, and I know how many speakers I have :-) it was easy enough to handle manually.

Randy at AudioVision SF warned me that burn-in could take 100hrs, and I tend to agree. When it was first installed, the sound was way more detailed than the Meridian units it replaced, but sounded a lot thinner. Over a two-day period it became much warmer, with a lot more bloom and air surrounding instruments.

But how does it sound?

So far I have tried CDs via coax; Blu-ray, a Dish DVR and an Apple TV via HDMI; and my phono preamp routed through the analog bypass mode.

The Cary sound is very similar across all of these sources. There is a ton of very fine detail, the sound stage is very clearly laid out, and the separation between instruments is really, really good. There is also a great sense of "bloom", the sense that each instrument has space and air around it.

I haven't spent a lot of time yet on movie soundtracks, but I plan to fix that this weekend. We have been watching a lot of concert movies lately, and both the Clapton Crossroads blu-ray and Lightning in a Bottle via Apple TV sounded great.

The sound is definitely still a little brighter and more forward than the Meridian sound, but it is definitely not at all hard or shrill. It handles violins beautifully, and that is usually where I find any digital/transistor artifacts stand out, so it is probably a reflection of the Meridian's "over-smoothness".

My system is at least as "musical" as before, and despite all the strong high-fidelity attributes the Cary is not at all sterile; it really lets the emotional content through.

Don't forget that I am comparing it to a pretty old Meridian 500 series combo; I'm really curious how the C12 would stack up against other modern digital processors.

The most shocking thing is that I swear the phono stage sounds better through the Cary than direct, although I might just be enjoying the fact that I now have remote control of LP volume for the first time.

No idea if I am losing anything without having ARC or Audyssey, but in the past I have found that adding any additional processing incurs a penalty in detail and musicality. I'm having too much fun listening to music to worry about that!

Operationally, there have been no issues but it is going to take a while to sort out the setup completely. I was worried that others had reported issues with things like skip forward or back on a DVR via HDMI, but I have not experienced this. There is a definite delay of a few seconds when switching HDMI sources or skipping tracks etc on an HDMI-connected device, but that is no big deal for me.

The only quibble so far is that a bit more gain would be nice. I'm going to experiment to see if that is something I can change via setup.

Bottom line: the sound quality is absolutely fabulous, the video switching works and stays out of the way, and I'm getting less sleep as I work through my music and movie collection..

So far, I'm a very happy Cary owner.

Peter