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

Did you run your room correction? If so, how did it go? (I've spent a lot of time building acoustic treatments for my houses through the years, and measuring the effects.  Plus I live near Dallas, and am just interested.)

I tried to run Audyssey in the bedroom and it kept erroring out saying too much ambient noise.

I also tried ARC in my main living room but my wife got up out of bed yelling at me to turn it off so no, I have not successfully completed a room correction process yet unfortunately.

Where are you located around Dallas?  What room corrections have you tried?

I live in Royse City, on the other side of Rockwall. 

I ended up building my own panels about 5 years ago, and again this past year when I moved. I have two sizes, 2'x4' and 16"x4'. All wrapped in different colors of burlap I picked up at a fabric store. Wish I could upload pics. I use REW and a UMIK mic to measure with. With the panels, I am getting good response reduction from 500Hz to 6.5KHz, with 20db reduction from 1.5KHz to around 4.5KHz.

I had a Marantz AVR with Audyssey, but hardly used it. I don't think it handled my speakers well (Magnepans). I currently have a MiniDSP DDRC-88A and use Dirac Live and bass management features. I'm happy with how it all sounds, but I'm really happy with the fact I can measure and get a quantitative result so I know it's not all in my head!

Woops, typo!  My room is 10db down in the 1.5KHz to 4.5Khz range, not 20db.  That would be something!

You can do a google search on "DIY acoustic treatment panels" and get pretty good info. 

@dtximages I guess the place to start is by getting an SPL meter and checking your ambient noise level. I think as long as it is below ~45dB you'd be okay to run a measurement sweep as long as your speakers were outputting ~75dB - ~85dB, although it could get tricky at some frequencies due to the potential large swing in SPL.

If your ambient noise is really too much, you will need to find a time when it is quiet outside (a holiday?) or do something to block out external noise. Maybe just let your wife know you need like 10-15 minutes of noise one time at night. It should only take about that long once you are familiar with the process, and you can get familiar with it at some other times just by going through it, knowing it is a throwaway calibration.