Analog room correction for vinyl

mijostyn

... you have not had more than trivial exposure to more than the most basic room control systems/programs. It does not matter what the source is ... You can not get the best imaging without this and there is no other way to do this ... Once you are in the digital domain you can literally do anything you want without distortion of any kind. Subwoofer integration any other way is folly. You can not accurately time and phase align any other way ... A properly set up digital correction system will sound much better regardless of the program source ... Having lived with this for 20 years or so I can walk up to a strange system and know to a large degree where it's failings are ...

Do you really believe all of this, mijostyn, or do you deliberately exaggerate for emphasis?

Digital processors can't do anything about standing waves, first reflections, flutter echo etc. This is a physics of sound waves produced by the speakers in a certain room. Every specialist will advice you to use bass traps, absorbers, diffusers ... just like in any recording studios and mastering rooms.  The size of the room is important, some rooms are too bad to be a listening room (especially a small room), some are much better.  Watch Acoustic Fields channel on youtube and you will find the answers much quicker than on audiogon. 

Analog correction for vinyl is a listening party.  I'm sure most collectors see the countless albums with names written on the covers.  Attempting to continually improve the visual soap opera effect on B&W Godzilla movies just to see the wires and then state how annoying they are kills me.

chakster, there are certainly reasons to use room treatment. There are areas where it will work better than digital correction. As for standing waves digital correction will make the frequency response at the listening position flat but as you move away you are still going to get the same undulations maybe even worse at some places. Avoiding this requires room design and appropriate sub woofer set up. All this works together to achieve the best results. What DSP gives you, complete control over the entire frequency range, accurate time alignment between speakers and drivers regardless of their position in the room and complete distortion-less control over crossovers can not be done any other way. I use all three methods, actually four. I use speakers that have inherent in their design less interaction with the room, a room designed for flat bass response, room treatment at critical first reflection points and DSP control.  www.audiovero.de/en/acourate.php I encourage people to go here and download trial samples of the program and play around. 

You may want to look for ten or twelve band equalizers (or better yet parametric equalizers) from the 80's - 90's.  You can patch them into your system and equalize for the room without digital.  Not as versatile nor accurate as digital equalizing, but with no digital side effects.