Here's the workflow that actually worked for me. I created a project in Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) dedicated just to my system, and I loaded it up front with everything about my room and gear — dimensions, wall materials, speaker positions, every piece of equipment, every treatment panel and where it sits. That context is the secret sauce: once Claude knows your room, its advice stops being generic and starts being specific to your situation. Then I ran REW sweeps from my listening seat and handed the measurement files straight to Claude. Don't worry about REW being complicated — you don't need to interpret the graphs yourself. Claude reads them, tells you what each peak and dip means, ranks the problems by which ones actually matter for what you'll hear, and walks you through the fix. In my case, for the DSP part, Claude gave me the exact filter settings (frequency, gain, Q) to plug into my Roon Nucleus's parametric EQ — no guessing. Then you re-measure, send the new sweep back, and iterate. Three or four rounds of measure-adjust-measure got me dramatically better sound. The big unlock is that the hard parts of REW — knowing what to measure, how to read it, what to do about it — are exactly the parts Claude handles for you. You just run the sweeps and turn the knobs it tells you to turn.
How to EQ my system for my room?
I apologize for my lack of technical skills right up front. After hours of bewilderment, I realized that the REW software is far beyond my abilities to learn and use so I downloaded HouseCurve, which functions similar to REW, and got a tone sweep of the sound in my room, which showed a big "hump" at about 50Hz and a null at around 350 Hz. The graphs are revealing, but what to do with the information??
I just bought Fabfilter Pro-4 and learned that it is "plug in" to used with other music processing software like Audirvana, which I have. I have enjoyed applying EQ to the music I hear on AV, but so far as I can tell, the music curve that it shows is not related to any sound in the room so I am just doing the EQ adjustments by ear which is fun and useful, but does not necessarily yield a flat response.
Backing up, I formerly had a DSPeaker Anti-Mode which used a microphone to get a tone sweep of the sound in the room and then with a press of a button, it would EQ to the sound as flat as possible. That is what I am hoping to get back to, something simple. I'd buy a DSP Anti-Mode again, but without a tape loop in my preamp, I don't know that I can connect it.
If there is a way to incorporate a tone sweep of my room into AV for initial EQ levelization, I sure be happy to learn about that. Any help would be really appreciated.
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Among the first things, you should look at the AM Acoustics room simulator. It will help you see where those modes are worse, and help you locate your speakers and listening locations to minimize them. Next, if they are still present nulls can be mitigated with bass traps like the GIK corner or soffit traps. The combination of bass trap + EQ can do wonders. If you can't apply bass traps the best you can do is cut the peaks, which is really important, sometimes more important than the nulls. Then you can use REQ wizard or OmniMic (my personal preference) to help you adjust. A parametric EQ is really the way to go here, either via miniDSP or Roon or similar. |
OP We make Virtual Systems on this site, with photos, and equipment lists. I suggest you take some photos (phone pics are good enough these days) and create a system, then members might have more specific suggestions. i.e. here’s my Virtual system https://www.audiogon.com/systems/9511 I added to mine, this and that, over 7 years, it started much simpler. |
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