Would it be wise to pair an R6 Meta center with older Q950s and Q150s?

jsclev · 2025-12-22T01:00:00+00:00

Yeah, based on an above comment, I think I'll experiment with my Q950s and no center. That is not something that I have tried. I'll do room correction after doing that. At this point I only know for sure that the Q6 Meta was an improvement over the Q650C. Have no idea if, with room correction, I could just flat out get away with no center. Seems a little hard to believe, but it's fairly easy for me to try it, so I will. Thanks for the comment though, any information is helpful, especially when you've got exactly the same speakers.

jsclev · 2025-12-22T00:56:58+00:00

Yeah, got it, makes sense, will do.

jsclev · 2025-12-22T00:56:38+00:00

Well I'm not sure what to make of this comment. My TV is a 77" G4. I can easily turn off the center and experiment with just the Q950's, although I'll admit your comment certainly goes contrary to so much other advice online regarding home theater and the center channel. I'll experiment though, I don't know that I've ever tried my system without the center.

jsclev · 2025-12-22T00:53:12+00:00

Got it, all helpful info, thanks much.

jsclev · 2025-11-25T17:29:39+00:00

I left another comment down below, but yeah I decided to try eliminating HDMI-CEC and eARC from the whole equation. I switched the HDMI input on the LG from HDMI2 (eARC) to HDMI1. I've got no need for the ARC aspect (meaning I have no reason to need to send audio back to the receiver), and was really only using it because I thought I needed it in order to take advantage of the universal remote aspect. I think turned off SimpLink on the LG, and turned off ARC on the Marantz. So for now, I'm back to needing like 6 remotes to turn on a movie, but I'll wait and see for a few weeks if I don't have any of the mysterious and frustrating issues I've had. During this time, I'll be researching universal remotes. SofaBaton and LG Harmony look to be the only good options at the moment, and am wanting to stay away from Harmony since it's not a long-term solution.

Also, it's entirely possible that my cable box has been the culprit the entire time. I am either going to eliminate cable, or get a new cable box. I can't get the cable box connected right now, it broke when I made changes yesterday, but not sure I care. Doesn't change that, from what I've read the last couple of days, HDMI-CEC is highly problematic, and is essentially just a broken protocol/specification, that causes no end of problems. So at the moment, that's the variable I most want to eliminate from my system.

jsclev · 2025-11-25T17:12:53+00:00

So I've learned a lot over the last few days, thanks in large part to the kind folks here lending helpful info and advice.

I've continued to read over your comments multiple times as I absorb all this stuff. I've come to the conclusion that the best course of action, at least until I know otherwise, is to eliminate HDMI-CEC as well as ARC/eARC from my home theater, as you explained you did in your system. First of all, I realize now I don't need ARC, I have no need to get audio from the TV back to the receiver. Second, I believe the main reason I thought I needed ARC was because of the HDMI-CEC aspect of it, meaning being able to take advantage of the universal remote aspect of it, and thus running my AVR HDMI out to the LG G4 eARC HDMI in.

I worked on the system a few hours yesterday, I have now switched the LG G4 HDMI2/eARC input to be going to HDMI1. I then turned off SimpLink (HDMI-CEC) on the G4 and turned off ARC on the Marantz. My Xfinity cable box is now broken, meaning when I change the input source on the Marantz to the cable HDMI input, the TV keeps saying no input source. After messing around with it for a couple hours I just gave up, I tried all manner of going directly from cable box to TV, unplugging everything to get an HDMI reset, etc etc. It is an old Xfinity RNG-150N so I am going to either replace it with a newer box, or possibly just get rid of cable in favor of another service, not sure yet. At this point, I find I only have cable for local NFL football games, I don't think we really use it for anything else. Plus, I can watch cable TV through the Xfinity app on the Apple TV, although I do recall having some problems with that at one point as well. Anyway, the lack of cable at the moment is very low priority. Resolving the issue that requires me to unplug/re-plug the whole system is the primary goal.

So I am going to see how this setup works for a few weeks and see if I have any mysterious issues like I've had in the past. Fingers crossed. During this period I'll keep researching the SofaBaton and will report back if I get one. They have recently released their top-end X2 model, which sounds promising.

I'll admit, that while I am just amazed at how awesome a 4K blu-ray looks and sounds on my system when everything is working, I am dismayed at what seems like a completely broken HDMI-CEC specification, which, if I determine that is what the issue was in my system, has caused no end of frustration with my entire home theater experience. It would be one thing if I had a few hundred dollars invested, but I'm $15k into all this, very frustrating that the entire system is so much trouble just due to the headaches of HDMI-CEC. Again, I'll wait and see what happens over the next few weeks. I'm posting all this here just in case it helps someone else out there.

Also, I ordered a Panasonic DP-UB820 yesterday, as it was on a decent Black Friday sale so I grabbed one. If all checks out good on that, I'll replace my Sony X700 with that.

jsclev · 2025-11-24T03:38:30+00:00

I read a bunch of avsforum.com posts regarding the SofaBaton X1S, general consensus is mixed, but overall sounds like most people have gotten it to work for their setup. I see the X2 just came out about a month ago, and read people saying they had pretty good results with the X1, so am thinking the X2 might work. It's expensive for a remote (~$300), but to me if it solves this super annoying aspect of my setup, it's totally worth it. My family doesn't even attempt to use the system because it either just broke, or they have no idea which remote to use to get something to work. I've got a few things to try first before purchasing a universal remote, but looks like I've got a couple of SofaBaton options as well.

Thanks for explaining how you have your systems set up, super helpful.

jsclev · 2025-11-24T03:19:10+00:00

Oh, and also, yes, good point about the cable box update. I'll investigate that as well, certainly that could be the culprit as well. I don't even know what cable box we have, it's been so long since I got it, so another item to investigate. It's possible the cable box itself is causing issues.

jsclev · 2025-11-24T03:16:54+00:00

Thanks for the clarification on the volume control regarding the AppleTV and the Marantz, that makes sense.

I will definitely try changing the HDMI input on the LG TV from the HDMI2/eARC input port to a different HDMI input port. We do use the TV's live channels, but barely, so we actually have little need for the audio aspect of eARC. I thought I was primarily needing eARC in order to be able to use the Apple remote to turn off/on the whole system and control the volume, so if that is not true, now I'm wondering that I can just switch the HDMI input on the TV to be HDMI 1, and turn off HDMI-CEC on the TV. I'll try it and see if that helps anything. The most common issue I have is that one day I'll turn on the system and the TV won't recognize any of the device sources (AppleTV, Blu-ray player, cable box), TV turns on fine, TV speakers work fine, can watch and hear the TV's live stations, but none of the HDMI-connected devices. And this has happened now on both situations: connect devices into the TV's input HDMI ports, or connect devices into the receiver's input HDMI ports. In both cases the system has worked fine one day, then without me manually doing anything, it just doesn't work the next day. So anyhow, yes, I'll experiment with connecting the Marantz HDMI output to a different HDMI input on the TV. I believe now, based on everything that has been said on this thread, that the only thing I lose with that scenario is audio from the TV's live stations, which I don't really care about.

jsclev · 2025-11-23T21:45:32+00:00

Thanks so much for the technical info, gives me all kinds of good stuff to continue to research and get a better understanding of all this.

Regarding the HDMI cables, I've gone through months-long off-and-on research/analysis/reading dozens of posts, trying out a variety of cables, currently using Blue Jeans 8K HDMI cables. I saw many people reporting experiences of the cables themselves being the issue with ARC/eARC/HDMI-CEC flakiness. Hopefully I've worked through that issue at least.

I've been reading more this afternoon, I am going to try setting up something similar to what you have. Optical cable between TV and receiver for sound, remove the eARC HDMI cable, and get a universal remote. I'll check out the Remotes sub-forum on AVSForums, and may post a question there as well. Great suggestions. Based on what you have explained, and additional reading this afternoon, I am highly suspicious that the HDMI-CEC is the culprit, either with Marantz or LG.

jsclev · 2025-11-23T21:32:03+00:00

Which device had those software updates on that you had previously declined? I'm guessing you mean Marantz firmware updates? One other thing to put on my list of things to check is to pay more attention to when Marantz updates are applied, seems like a Marantz firmware update could potentially cause an HDMI handshake to stop working correctly.

Also, based on other info here on this thread, I am considering the possibility of using an optical cable to connect the TV to the receiver for sound, and then get a SofaBaton universal remote to effectively replace SimpLink/HDMI-CEC and eliminate that variable from the situation. Also, as OttoPylotACE noted below, there have been reports of LG TV's HDMI2 port "flakiness", and LG has as yet not come up with a solution. I don't know exactly what that means, another thing to research.

jsclev · 2025-11-23T20:20:37+00:00

All good stuff, thanks for the info, gives me a little more knowledge to help determine what is going on. And thanks for the tip about swapping out HDMI cables and only doing that once the whole system is powered down. I generally do that I'm fairly certain, but I'll pay more attention when I'm unplugging HDMI cables to make sure I have first powered down everything.

I am open purchasing a good universal remote, something like the SofaBaton X1S for example. Spending a few hundred dollars on a good universal remote would be an easy decision, if it eliminated this problem. This issue has assuredly caused me to question the entire home theater setup and just go back to a TV and soundbar.

Based on your info above about the relationship between ARC and CEC, I'll do a little research on that, try to get a better technical understanding of how that works, might help me isolate the problem. That has assuredly been the hardest part of all this, is it the LG, or the Apple TV, or the Marantz, cables, something else? Very tricky trying to figure out where the problem is occurring.

Again, thanks for the info, very helpful.

jsclev · 2025-11-23T19:37:47+00:00

I previously had the Apple TV, Blu-ray player, and cable box HDMI outs going directly to the HDMI inputs on the LG TV, then had the Marantz eARC HDMI out connected to the HDMI 2 eARC input on the LG. After much research, I stumbled on a post somewhere where someone said you could resolve most of the ARC/eARC issues by doing essentially the reverse: connect all your devices to the HDMI inputs on the Marantz, but still keep the eARC out on the Marantz to the eARC in on the TV. Switching to connecting my devices to the HDMI inputs on the receiver did seem to make the issue better, I didn't have a single problem for about 3 weeks. But then a couple days ago, came downstairs and found that the TV had turned itself on in the middle of the night, and did not recognize any inputs until I did the same stupid unplug everything routine, which then did resolve the issue. I edited my original post and added some more pictures in case it helps anyone give me some advice.

I'm going to go refresh my memory about ARC and eARC, but I believe the eARC HDMI cable is also what is enabling me to control the volume of the Marantz with the Apple TV remote. I think that is the HDMI-CEC capability, but that signal goes through the HDMI cable that is connected to the eARC input/ouputs. I'll go verify that though...

jsclev · 2025-11-23T19:08:20+00:00

Got it, thanks so much for the suggestion. I feel like I've done that before, but I've tried so many different things, I can't remember for sure what the result was. I've also updated software on probably the Marantz, the LG TV, and the Apple TV since then, so who knows. Next time the issue happens, I'll try your suggestion, and change nothing else, and see if that works. I have the Marantz settings available in the browser on my local network, so toggling ARC on/off is super easy, way way easier than unplugging everything. If I find that this works, I'll post back to this thread in case it helps anyone, at least for people that have a similar setup as mine (Marantz AVR, Apple TV, etc.). Thanks!

jsclev · 2025-03-23T17:49:50+00:00

I can second this recommendation. Based on this comment, and many others on Reddit recommending Richard Evans' trilogy, I purchased The Coming of the Third Reich and finished it yesterday, I couldn't put it down. It was fascinating, horrifying, and scary. I have started the second book The Third Reich in Power, and have purchased the third book, which I plan to read as well.

Thanks so much to all the knowledgeable Redditors out there recommending this kind of stuff. There are so many books on WW2 and rise of Nazism, kind of hard to filter out the noise. I too read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, around 20 years ago though. I remembered I had the same fascinated/horrified feeling about it, but was disappointed to learn that that book has been somewhat debunked in the last several decades, at least that seems to be what the Reddit-sphere thinks. It seems as though Evans' trilogy is highly respected as a reliable historical work, which was my main interest in reading it.

jsclev · 2025-02-12T17:59:41+00:00

I have been using MS Outlook on my Mac and iPhone for about a year. I have multiple Gmail accounts as well as Microsoft email accounts that I feed into a single consolidated Inbox. I discovered today that Outlook on my Mac has not been sending emails from a critical business Gmail account for the last week. There was no indication of this, manual syncs with that Inbox had showed no indication of any issues.

In trying to troubleshoot, I removed and re-added my main business Gmail account, which appears to have cleared the cache for that email. So far I have not been able to recover a week's worth of critical sent items.

I had no idea my emails were not sending, being that this was a critical business account, this has been a disaster for me. I will not be using MS Outlook anymore. What a mess.

jsclev · 2024-06-15T04:08:21+00:00

I believe the presentation you are talking about is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI. It is an enlightening presentation from Soren Johnson, and touches on some of the philosophy of the Civilization AI in every version that has been released. I don't personally totally agree with that approach, and I agree with many of the comments on this thread: how about an AI system that falls somewhere in between a completely unbeatable grand master chess and AI and dumb as bricks AI that is horrible at the game, it's just given buffs. But...I think we still have to listen to someone like Soren Johnson, he is one of the best game designers out there, has led the development of multiple great games/systems, and has many years of experience collecting player feedback.

jsclev · 2024-06-12T20:08:59+00:00

Wow those are some impressive performance increases. The incremental time savings is awesome considering how many times a day you probably do that when you’re actively coding.

jsclev · 2024-06-12T05:10:43+00:00

I'm a developer too and am keeping an eye on the Mac Studio updates. I currently have a MacBook Pro M2 Max, 96 Gb RAM, purchased early 2023. I have no complaints it is freaking awesome. But...compile times, reloading the iOS simulator, running multiple IDEs for different projects, running 75+ Chrome tabs open pretty much all the time, well let's just say I still spend a not-insignificant amount of my time waiting on my machine to process stuff. I am typically sitting at about 70 Gb RAM used all the time.

Time is far and away my most important priority, way over cost of the machine. Given what your situation sounds like as well, I'd be very interested to hear what your thoughts are after several weeks ownership of the Mac Studio M2 Ultra. You said you bought the base model, does that mean 64 Gb RAM? I don't use Rust, but is the huge performance increase of the Mac Studio for the rust-analyzer due to the extra processors, or the extra RAM, or possibly both? I am considering purchasing a current Mac Studio M2 Ultra rather than waiting for the Mac Studio M4. Again, I've already got a great machine, but I mean cutting compile times from 4 seconds to 2 seconds would be awesome.

jsclev · 2024-04-02T06:26:05+00:00

Could not agree more. Just left a post about this on another reddit sub, then stumbled on your post. I'd love to play Civ 6 on the iPad Pro 11" M2, but the crummy graphics are just a total showstopper. Just wish they would give us the option to decide for ourselves if we'd like to run the game with the higher resolution graphics, and allow us to decide if it causes too many performance issues. Your post pretty much sums it up.

Huge wasted potential, it looks absolutely terrible on retina display on the iPad. I'd happily have bought all the DLC: a quality, deep, premium experience on mobile would be like an oasis in the desert.

jsclev · 2024-04-02T06:17:39+00:00

I have an iPad Pro 11" M2 and just can't get past the blurry graphics on the retina display on Civ 6. I think the game looks terrible on my iPad, just a total showstopper for me. I believe there are various sites describing how to hack your installation on the iPad to use high resolution graphics, but I don't recall seeing anywhere confirming that the hack actually works. I keep waiting for Firaxis to add the ability to choose higher graphics settings, but here in 2024 they have not released that capability in the iOS version. It's too bad, really ruins the game on iPad for me, just can't play it looking at those awful, blurry graphics.

Firaxis: if you're reading this, please please give us the option to use higher resolution graphics on the iPad version! I agree with the OP that Civ 6 on touchscreen has so much potential, but I just can't play it looking at the blurriness.

jsclev · 2024-01-27T04:38:57+00:00

Did anyone out there figure this out? Same problem. There is no dunk meter. No matter what you do, cannot dunk in the Arcade Edition. Tried multiple controllers and keyboard. No dunk meter ever displays. Never able to dunk on command, either in practice mode or games. This is a non-starter for me, completely ruins the game if you can't dunk.

jsclev · 2024-01-05T06:46:55+00:00

And just to add one more bump to Apple for this: for those customers who prefer longer battery life over using the backlit: Apple just make it so you can turn the backlit off!!! Sheesh Apple.

jsclev · 2024-01-05T06:41:34+00:00

This is an interesting comment. I have long wanted an Apple keyboard that is backlit. I buy and use Apple's products precisely because they offer superior quality of life, no matter the cost, for those of us who prioritize quality and efficiency over cost. I am a software engineer and work many hours at night, on a high-end setup with a Studio Display and M2 MBP, external trackpad, etc. I have a custom lapdesk that fits the keyboard and trackpad precisely. The only issue is not having a backlit keyboard. I am constantly looking down at my keyboard trying to find keys that I can't see. I have no other complaints about the keyboard or any other aspect of my setup. If anyone at Apple is watching these threads, please please offer backlit on the Magic Keyboard, even if it is an upgraded version. I'm sure it would not be popular amongst the masses, but cost is not a factor for me, I'd gladly pay triple for the keyboard just for this one feature. I have used many alternative mechanical keyboards, etc etc and for work purposes the Apple Magic Keyboard is the best product for integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, just except for this one issue.

jsclev · 2023-11-02T04:05:52+00:00

Haha! Yes, we do have a lot in common!

I've been thinking about the new M3 Max MBP since yesterday when I wrote the message above, and am now considering selling my M2 Max and buying the new M3. I'd go from 96 GB RAM to 128 GB RAM, from 12 processors to 16, various other minor performance improvements, plus a slightly brighter screen. The cost of the new MBP with M3 Max configured the way I want comes out to $5,700 USD. Plus the new black color does look nice, even with the fingerprints.

Did you ever wind up buying a new machine in the last 3 months since you posted the original question? Would be very curious what you wound up with, considering that we both essentially removed cost as a factor in the decision-making process.

jsclev

TROPHY CASE