Room correction ?

Hi James i have been using JRiver on Mac mini and you can create your own profiles by ear on it. Its basically a graphic equalizer. But i have left it engaged as i think it soes sound better.

was thinking about getting a microphone, but gonna wait on that for a bit. Need to see where i'm headed.

would love to try Dirac and see what i does

Graeme

I'd love to try but have never figured out how I'd implement it on my system (Supernait 2, NDS).  My room is particularly bad; very little 'soft' materials.  We have hardwood floors, can't have a rug as the dog "uses" it if we do, and my wife is not interested in curtains (we have a rather modern interior) or panels on the walls that aren't our art.

Some systems implement room correction at the digital source (like Wat uses I believe).  Absent that, which wouldn't work for my system . . . no idea what options I have!

I was resistant to the idea of room correction software; surely it would degrade the delicate musical message I've invested so much time and effort optimising?

Joe Bibb of this forum very kindly demonstrated the benefit of the Amarra Symphony iRC software in my system & I was very impressed. I still use the profile he so carefully set up and in my view it is one of the most significant improvements I've made to my system and the most cost-effective by a considerable margin.

Amarra iRC uses the Dirac system, which is very sophisicated and although fairly time-consuming to set up initially is well worth the small effort involved. I have two systems in different locations and in my main system I use the room correction with all my digital material. This in a room I've always regarded as pretty benign acoustically. In the second system, in a room with large glass patio doors, the room correction required is far less.

I'm really at a loss to understand why folks are so reluctant to try room correction, yet seem prepared to drop many thousands of pounds on cabling  with hardly a thought. Weird! Adding physical devices to control room nodes may ultimately prove more effective but to achieve the same results as can be gained by the software may not be practical or domestically acceptable.

there is one other huge benefit, well as far i can see. If you change your listening room, if your lucky enough to have a dedicated one, furnishings or decor or whatever you can just perform another setup of the correction software to take it into account.

otherwise all those expensive boxes and speakers may need to change. This is why i would like to try this mac mini route. Problem is all those nice boxes keep-a-calling 

 Thanks Wat -- using my Macbook Pro just to experiment is a fine suggestion.  I'm more interested in something that 'listens' to my room and applies good correction than something that has me listening myself and playing with a zillion frequencies up and down   I know from experience that I'm never satisfied that I've done it right / well, and I do not want to be listening to music and wondering if I set the sliders right!

Ive been reading up on this quite a bit recently, and it seems quite hit and miss to get the calibrations with a mic and software correct. In JRiver there are around ten sliders to play with, and to be honest its not hard to tell when its good or bad. Will certainly give you idea of what's achievable 

Room correction is far more than just 'graphic equalizing' you are foregtting the timing / phase part of room correction. Also it is not a hit-and-miss if you use proper software for the analysis and know what your target curve should look like.

There are only two decent software packages for room correction, that I have heared off: Dirac and AudioVero, with the latter one being best.

You also do need a proper, measurement-type, of microphone.

The effects can be really great.

For me it does require extra storage space as I do offline convolving and (obviously) want to keep the original files as well.

cheers

Aleg from what ive read, as i have no first hand experience, is its quite hit and miss in the sense its quite hard to get it correct. 

It seems that because the microphone takes the place of the human body, us, then when we sit down we introduce an extra dimension. Hence its quite difficult to get the curve right.

Maybe hit and miss is the wrong term

I've been using Linn’s room correction for 6 weeks now and it is a great improvement. The way Linn have implemented it, there is no need for a microphone; you only need an approximately box shaped room, a laser distance meter and some time for critical listening ("tune-dem" in Linn speak).

First of all with room correction the boom has vanished which has plagued my square listening room ever since I started with hifi. And should my SL2s need a replacement some day I’m now less afraid to try out some speakers which have more bass. This alone would be sufficient to recommend room correction.

But what I found most remarkable is how much information is hidden by these low frequency room modes. Removing the excess energy from the room modes revealed much more detail even at higher frequencies.

So if you have a small to medium room I suggest to give room correction a try.

Fox

That's not my experience.

When positioning the microphone at proper height and position equivalent to your ears when sitting in your listening position, I didn't notice any strangeness afterwards.

What I find most difficult is to determine what is the proper target curve, as there are different theories about what curve is 'best' / most natural and also there is the aspect of subjectivity of what I like most.

'Offline convolving' .. Sorry Aleg sounds like the marketing department at work again. Convolution is simply the mathematical term for multiplying samples by another set of samples .. Often a filter response or reverb response.. So this would simply mean modifying or tailoring your source files to suit your room profile .. So 'room adjusted media' would surely be a clearer term?.. and of course we have kissed good bye to being 'bit perfect' at this point.

Afterall all our DACs use convolution but we don't normally refer to that unless we are describing the maths within the reconstruction filter.

i am not knocking the process if it sounds good, but it does wind me up the way some terms are used to make things sound slightly mystical for the uninitiated...

Simon

Aleg

Cheers, that's good to know. I think i'm just gonna have to bite the bullet and get a mic and have a go.

That'll be me then

Thanks for all the input chaps - really useful to hear of some first hand experiences.

I run Audivarna as my music player so the Dirac option appeals. I don't have a 'difficult' room but do have a slight issue around certain bass frequencies that i'd be interested in trying to dial out.

I see there is a trial version - with a suitable mic, does this allow you to get a good feel as to how room correction will perform ?

Aleg - i take it you've run the room correction calibration already on your files. Any reason why you've done this rather than just applying on the fly or is this just the way the AudioVero SW works ?

James

Regarding the measurements; with the Amarra iRC Dirac setup you measure at several different points around your normal sitting position, unlike other systems I've seen (I use ARC for my surround sound system). As Aleg's pointed out, Dirac and Audiovero are very sophisticated and a world away from the graphic equalisers you find with some software players. Nevertheless by using these you can get an idea of how useful room correction can be. The effect can be very finely tweaked to only alter the sound over specific frequency ranges.

I fully understand most folks' reluctance to manipulate the musical signal in this way, robbing it of its "purity", but so far I've detected no losses, only significant gains. So far I've shied away from applying room correction to my precious vinyl replay but the more I listen to the two sources the more I'm inclined to give it a try, using the standalone Dirac box of tricks.

I'm not selling this stuff, just suggesting people should give it a try before passing judgment. Or maybe we'll have to wait until Naim inevitably follow Linn in this field before the idea's taken seriously here.

Agreed.  With decent mixed phase correction you are not removing bits of signal.  Any domestic room to a greater or lesser extent, will be emphasising or diminishing aspects or even hiding parts of what is being produced.  These solutions give you the opportunity to remove or reduce these effects by recognising how your room will deal with them and making allowance.

The flexibility ranges from dealing with specific and obvious aberrations like bass humps, to correction up to a desired frequency level, or across the whole range.  The comparison of 'corrected' v 'uncorrected' is very easy at all times and can be revelatory.

Room correction... I don't trust it.

1. You can't get room correction for live un-amped music performances - they sound like the room which is fine. Stereo was always about putting the music in your room anyway. Room correction makes more sense for multichannel where you are trying to transport yourself to the venue and erase the room.

2. I have a 90 degree curving wraparound floor to ceiling window 7m long! Whatever I setup in room correction is going to be nullified as soon as I draw the curtains which totally changes the sound. Right now my wife enjoys the hifi for its simplicity (twist a simple big volume knob and select a track in Naim app). If she had to remember to choose a room correction profile on something according to whether the curtains were drawn or not she would never use the hifi again - which would be a waste of money.

You can create as many profiles as you like, but from my own experience in the end you just use one exclusively. Nothing to mess with, just a better sound.

Try it...

Just isn't going to happen. Others might feel differently. Although not a good reason since others probably are in a similar situation but feel differently, for me, the fact I work in IT as an engineer means I want the living room to be a computer-free zone. No Macs, no PCs, no tablets. I tolerate the iPhone purely as a remote control for the NDX.

I'm not writing it off but I won't go into tweakery - it would need to be integrated into the hifi and I already knew about Exakt when I chose the Naim gear. If this is something Naim roll out in the future I will try it then. For now, it is a lot of pfaff (even if it works wonders) for someone who can't stand the sight of a computer at the end of a day.

tonym, does the correction software work will all file resolutions. I mean 24bit and DSD etc

Yes, works with all file types and resolutions. No faff, no tweakery, set it up the once & forget it's there. 

But I guess it will need playing from a computer, right ? I would agree with the earlier poster that it could be interesting to do something about room correction - but it should be possible from the NAS without involvement of the pc on a permanent base.

If we can run it from NAS it could be perfect.

Bert, i had a look earlier at AudioVero, as mentioned by Aleg, and i'm sure i read they had a NAS option. In fact they seemed to have quite a few options.

Graeme

The stand alone version is just that.  Once you have created filters and loaded them, a little headphone amp sized box containing them sits there like a pre amp.  No computers, no faff.  Select filter or switch out - how hard can that be?