Remote learning

Remote learning is how your preamp is taught to respond to an infrared remote - any remote, not a specific factory-matched one. You point a remote at the preamp, tell it which function you want a button to perform, and press that button a few times. From then on, that button drives that function.

This isn’t an alternative to some other built-in remote support - it’s the only way the preamp recognizes any remote at all. Nothing is pre-programmed at the factory and nothing is hardcoded in the firmware: on a brand new unit, or one that’s had its learned codes cleared, no remote button does anything until you teach it here.

Because nothing is pre-programmed, remote learning is not optional the way it might be on a device with a default remote to fall back on - it’s the setup step that gets any remote working with the preamp at all, factory-supplied or otherwise. The upside is flexibility: you can just as easily teach it a universal remote, a remote you already use for another component, or a replacement for a lost original, without being limited to one specific handset.

Earlier V4 firmware supported a different, now-retired mechanism called remote pairing: holding the encoder pushbutton in for about 10 seconds put the preamp into a pairing mode that bound it to one specific handset, recognized through a small set of decoders built into that firmware for a few known remote types.

As of firmware Rev 220 (7.14.26), remote pairing is no longer a supported feature, and the decoders it relied on were removed along with it - the firmware no longer recognizes any specific remote out of the box. Remote learning, described on this page, fully replaced pairing as the only way to associate a remote with the preamp. If your unit shows a firmware revision of 220 or later on its Info screen, any instructions you have for remote pairing no longer apply - there’s no pairing mode left to enter.

If you’re supporting a unit still running firmware older than Rev 220, see Remote pairing (legacy) for how pairing worked on that firmware.

Remote learning is reached from the preamp’s setup menu, under Learn. Selecting it puts the preamp into a dedicated learning screen and hands the encoder knob over to a simple, two-purpose job: while you’re in this screen, turning the knob no longer navigates the regular menu - it steps through the list of functions that can be taught. This trade-off exists because the infrared receiver is busy capturing whatever your remote sends while you’re teaching it, so the encoder is left as the one reliable way to move around and to leave the screen.

The 13 functions that can be taught are, in the order the knob cycles through them:

The display always shows which function is currently selected, whether a code has already been learned for it, and (as explained below) how the current teaching attempt is progressing.

With the function you want to teach showing on screen, point your remote at the preamp and press the button you want to assign to it.

The preamp doesn’t commit a code the instant it sees one - a single stray signal shouldn’t be able to overwrite a working setup. Instead, it waits to see the same code arrive three times before it trusts it enough to save. Each time the code you just sent matches the one before it, the on-screen match count moves up by one; once it reaches 3, the code is written to memory and the display marks that function as learned ("good").

Press the button normally, once per press, and let go between presses - the preamp is only counting distinct button presses, not how long you hold it down. Holding the button in is fine and won’t cause problems, but it won’t speed anything up either, since only a fresh press advances the count.

If a different code shows up partway through - for example you meant to press a different button, or a stray signal came from something else in the room - the preamp doesn’t try to average it in or guess which one you meant. It drops back to zero and starts counting fresh on whichever code arrived most recently. If that function already had a code learned from a previous session, that older code is cleared out the moment a different one appears, rather than being left in place alongside a half-finished new attempt - so a function on screen always reflects either "nothing learned yet," "still confirming a new code," or "confirmed," and never a stale mixture of the two.

A small number of remote buttons are known to send a second, unrelated-looking signal a few milliseconds after the real one. The preamp recognizes this pattern and quietly ignores the extra signal rather than letting it look like a mismatched button press and reset your progress. You shouldn’t need to do anything differently for those buttons - just press them normally.

If you press a button and nothing on the screen seems to change - the match count and status stay exactly as they were - the display briefly flashes to let you know the press was received. This mainly happens right after a mismatch, or when you send one more confirming press to a function that’s already fully learned; either way, it’s confirmation that the preamp saw your press even though there was nothing new to show for it.

Turning the knob while in the learning screen moves to the next or previous function in the list. Whatever teaching progress you had for the function you’re leaving is abandoned - moving away doesn’t cost you an already-learned code, but a partially-confirmed new one (below a match count of 3) is not kept. When you return to a function later, learning picks up from whatever is actually stored for it: if it already has a learned code, that code is treated as already confirmed, so the very next matching press is recognized immediately rather than looking like the start of a new attempt.

Pressing the encoder knob briefly (under about 5 seconds) exits remote learning and returns you to the Learn item in the setup menu, leaving everything you’ve taught in place.

Holding the encoder knob in for 5 seconds or longer, while in the learning screen, clears every function’s learned code at once and returns all 13 to "nothing learned." The screen shows a running seconds count while the button is held down so you can see how close you are to triggering this - release before 5 seconds to back out normally instead, or clear a single function on its own simply by teaching it a different code, as described above.

There’s no per-function "erase" - if you want to remove just one learned code without replacing it with another, use the full clear and reteach the functions you want to keep.

Once a code reaches a match count of 3, it’s written to the preamp’s non-volatile memory immediately, not just held for the current session. Learned codes survive power cycles and firmware updates, and remain in effect until you either relearn that function with a different code or clear everything and start over.