Which order to apply room correction tools?

I agree you should first do everything without applying any filtering. Place the speakers, then find good locations for the subwoofers. Since you have 3 subwoofers, you are probably going to have to treat at least two of them as a single channel so keep that in mind during placement: in other words two of them probably need to be the same distance from your seating position.

Room treatments should go on either as part of your first step in speaker positioning, or right afterwards. Since everything coming next is going to be influenced by the treatments.

Second I would use Room EQ Wizard and Multi-Sub Optimizer to perform PEQ independently on each subwoofer (two of which will be grouped into a single channel in the SHD) to flatten their response.

Third, use Room EQ Wizard to figure out the appropriate delays (positive or negative) for your subwoofers, relative to one of your main speakers. Enter these delays into the SHD for the subwoofer outputs.

At this point, your subwoofers should have relatively flat frequency responses and be time-aligned with one of your main speakers.

Finally run Dirac.

Thank you, Millercarbon.  i’m sure you’re right, but I don’t know if I have the patience or ability to do that much listening. I’d like to try the tools.  Some day you can say told ya so.  

Nekoaudio:  Thanks so much for your reply.  That is exactly what I was looking for.  A couple of clarifying questions:

1. Are you saying that’s doing PEQ on each subwoofer requires both REW and MSO, or are you saying do both separately?

2. You say use REW to set the subwoofer timing relative to mains.  What about the mains?  Should you do any REW PEQ on the mains at all?  Or is that taken care of by Dirac?

Thanks,

Alan

That's nice. There is by the way no such thing as time alignment with subs. But being impatient, carry on.

Gotta burn to learn.  

Millercarbon: upon re-reading this, I came across as a smart ass. Sorry.  Not my intention.  

You obviously have deep experience in these areas, and your advice about placement etc. was very helpful, and actionable.  I know what to do with that advice.  Your advice about listening, clapping your hands and listening, etc. is harder to turn into action.  What do I listen for?  What do I do when I hear things?  Any elaboration would be appreciated.  

Nekoaudio: if you get a chance to answer the two questions I posed to you above, I’d be most grateful.