Room correction in noisy environment (ARC, Dirac, Minidsp, REW)

First chance you get, go on-line, look up Fletcher-Munson curves. Then do a search for room reinforcement, nodes, frequency and speaker placement. If you're smart it should take like maybe an hour to understand that no matter how quiet you can get your room, the best you can hope for with DSP is to get it almost as good as you could do by ear. And then only at one volume level. Even then only in the one location. And only at the cost of making things worse everywhere else.

In other words DSP is a colossal waste of time and money.

That's the good news. The better news, hardly anyone bothers to do the reading and thinking to figure this out. There's more technically unsavvy audiophiles than you can shake a stick at. So there's a ready market and you will have no trouble selling your DSP to one of these rubes.

You don’t really need room correction. that would be the wrong direction, IME.

you can’t counter the sound of machine guns going off by adding the the sound of different machine guns at a higher and droning kind of level... to cover it up. It’s an exaggeration, but this is what active room correction is being asked and tasked with doing, in your particular scenario.

You need to drop your noise floor. You need to correct the room noise floor, you need to drop the room noise floor, you need mechanical and acoustical treatment in and of that room.

Or...move location.

Active room correction can do nothing good here. All you’ll achieve is some dirty bits of screaming over the noise.

My answer comes from working extensively with someone who is at the top of the trade in the associated technical areas and is tasked with fixing such problems.

It is not necessarily expensive to fix, it just needs to be tackled correctly. eg, window noise, sound coming through windows, through the glass. Some of the security films can work wonders here. (security films have the drawback of making windows very much a non-exit point in case of a fire. Even swat teams can't get through the dang things)

But to me, it sounds like you might have to move, to get anywhere at all with this, at any reasonable level of bother and expense. (I looked up some images on the net re the restaurant, etc)

Good info. I'm interested in this security film.

Also, to be clear, I'm not trying to drown out or compensate for outside noise. I'm just trying to use ARC the way it's intended but afraid my high noise level will botch the measurements completely.

I think this is very often the case with anyone's system.  Think about this, when you put on a set of noise cancelling headphones, it's amazing how much quieter it is!  Most rooms have high ambient noise naturally even though you don't really perceive it.

So I wonder how many peoples' measurements have been botched due to this.

https://aquietrefuge.com/noise-blocking-window-film/

some of the 3m security films can reduce noise in room and drop transmission as well.

some investigation will be required.

5db is a huge reduction.

https://soundproofliving.com/acoustical-window-film/ 
re the 3m stuff, it was an accidental discovery, found after the installs. It was not planned but that is how it turned out.

Then, some folks decided to go after the acoustical transmission treatment aspect - as the main sauce.

It is still evolving as a science/engineered technology, but options are coming into being.

do the leg work.....


If you can get about 3-4db out of film coating the glass windows, if there are a lot of them... then that's a big deal, a big gain.

You MAY need room correct if your speakers are too big for your room. Why would you want to have too big speakers for a room, well because. 

Some of these "get of my lawn posters" likely cannot think beyond there own reality. Don't list to any dips around here telling you their truth.