Digital Room Correction: The Final Frontier?


Like most of you, I've been experimenting with different room treatments, and various other tweaks (footers, power conditioners and cables, interconnects, etc.) for many years trying to optimize my ever changing system.

I've enjoyed my system immensely, but I knew I had some speaker/room problems, and I was growing increasingly tired of listening to an over-ripe lower midrange, a boomy lower bass (even with the speakers 6-7' into the room) and a rolled-off upper-mid/lower treble on my Talon Khorus (and before that similar problems with my Genesis V and ProAC 3.5).

So I attacked my room. I put bass busters in the corners, Roomtunes along the ceiling borders, a thick 12'x15' Oriental carpet, and at one point last year had (count 'em) eight Roomlenses in my room. It all helped.

I tried several different amps, finally settling on a Gamut D200, which helped ameliorate the ripe mids and tightened/lightened the lower bass, aided by a switch to Nordost Quattro-fil ICs and Wireworld Silver Eclipse lll cables (after trying at least 15 cables).

Added an Audiomagic Stealth along with BMI Shark/ EG Fatman PCs. Used Bright Star Gemini sandbox/innertube. Floated the speakers and digital with Aurios. Again, it all helped. Some.

Finally, after hearing one in a friend's system, and being quite impressed, last week I installed a Tact 2.2x in my system. I'll post a review after I've had more time experimenting with it, but I'm flabbergasted.

First, I was both horrified and reassured by the uncorrected room measurements. Horrified to see a 10dB peak at 28Hz, along with a huge rise in the mids and steep drops in the upper-mid/ lower treble. Reassured because that's what I was hearing, and now I could see it on a graph.

Surprised, because I had thought my dedicated room was a reasonable size for audio (16'x24'x10'). Surprised that after such careful speaker placement and measurements, one speaker reached my ears so much before the other.

Surprised to find that all those other tweaks I thought were so helpful, were so minor compared to what the Tact 2.2x can do. I can even-out the frequency response, time align the speakers and clean up the mids and bass with a simple push of a button (well, after some serious mouse work); all with a minimum cost in other areas.

Going back to bypass mode, my speakers now sound like I threw a blanket over them.

More to come....
richards

Showing 1 response by newbee

Rives, In the past your posts seemed to be helpful and responsive to inquiries. In this case it seems that its just advertising and meant as much for the consumption of other readers as for the original poster. It appears from the posters comments that he has little understanding of standing waves caused by room dimensions and how one can avoid them passively, or at least lessen them substantially. You could at least have referred him to your web site wherein you have a good discussion about the problem and provide evaluative tools for proper placement of speakers and listening positions (at least for starting points). Incidentially, after I looked at your site, i checked my speakers and they were within 1" of your suggested location - the listening position was not as close.