Experienced only: What have you done with room correction?


I like to sometimes ask questions just to learn how others have experienced a technology and this is one of those times.

I’m genuinely curious about who has applied automatic room correction, and what your experience was? Did it turn your Monitor Audios into Martin Logans? Your Martin Logans into Wilsons? 😀

Good and bad, but experienced only please!

For the record, I use it for HT now and I’m meh. I had much better luck with manually (with tools) adjusting my miniDSP.  Also, I'm absolutely not looking to buy anything, I just want to read about your experiences because it is fun.

erik_squires

I'm currently using one of MiniDSP's Dirac Live boxes, which corrects both frequency and time domains.

My system is pretty basic - homemade speakers using Alpair 10.2 full-range drivers, FLAC rips on a PC played through Foobar2000, and a tpa3620-based chip amp.

The Dirac Live correction makes a profound difference. This is in a rented pre-war NYC apartment, which isn't optimal acoustically. I can't play loudly, so also dialed in some "smiley face" EQ. 

It's night and day better with room correction.

Before that, I used MathRoomEQ, a plugin for Foobar2000. That made things better, but Dirac Live puts more there, there.

 

I built my system around the principles of Edward Choueiri and his BACCH system. It’s the last piece I have to add. As of now I try to find room spaces when I move that are not square which help with avoiding standing waves (Modes /Nodes) and keep the speakers off the walls as much as I can. There is lots of great information here and ways to do this. I have large full range 20.1 Maggie’s which are as close to line source as I could get, four large subwoofers (also asymmetrically placed in the room) and measured the room (speakers and listening position) with Room EQ Wizard and then input that data into Multi Sub Optimizer via an Earthworks M30 microphone to generate filters everything running out of my Mini DSP with balanced connections which is processing all filters at 56bit/ 96kHz. There are no A/D conversions, it’s digital from start to finish. I’ve ripped out the analog crossovers and use the Mini DSP to input directly into the amps which power the speakers actively. As others have alluded it is almost impossible to correct a bad room with room correction alone. You can very effectively do it by adding more subwoofers. . . Most of the shorter wavelengths die fairly quickly on reflections and room treatments work great for those, the worst offenders are the lower order notes that cause all the issues. It’s crazy to listen to the system before the filters are built (scared the daylights out of me) and to also see the filters that are created after all the processing is complete. The results are stunning.

Thanks,

Steve

 

I have a dual system. I use a Sonora streamer with PSAudio 2 channel  with bypass for an anthem home theater. I looked long and hard to see how to do room correction for both. First I ended up with a JL CR-1 so sub could be used for both. But first I did speaker placement and room acoustic treatments. That is a must. 
 

Arc was pretty straight forward. It does all the work but I did not like it for 2 channel.   I went with roon and used a convolution filter from 1khz and down. Makes a huge improvement in SQ. Well worth the effort. 

At one point used DRC Designer - a room correction software working in both the amplitude and time domain - over my previous, passively configured all-horn speakers. At the same time at had those speakers high-passed, digitally, just below 80Hz in conjunction with a pair of tapped horn subs (that I still use with my current speakers), so: 3 filtering processes overlaid, incl. the passive XO.

Anyway, DRC Designer was a sonic double-edged sword; on the one hand it made for a flatter and more decent/"correct" presentation with more extended HF and a resonance suppression at ~125Hz in particular. On the other hand it took a "shine" off the sound with a mildly bleached/stale and even sterile imprinting. I finally realized that I wanted my main speakers and overall configuration to be something else, finding it better to just leave those main speakers play full-range as they were (preferably with an SET), flaws and all and great qualities as well, without subs augmentation. That, however, wasn’t where I was heading.

What I have now is fully active with only a single element of filtration, namely a Xilica digital XO/DSP. No room correction or passive XO parts of any kind. We’ve measured the HF/MF horn in each channel, near field, to address slight frequency response irregularities with a few mild notches and a single (also mild) peak suppression. Everything wrt. to the chosen values of gain and Q here, as well as the remaining filter settings, has been done by ear in the listening position over a period of time. Delay adjustments was the last, major area in the tweaking process, that are sometimes revisited (in conjunction with speaker positioning) for minute adjustments in the wake of changes elsewhere in the chain, should they occur.