Should we correct to Schroder, or full range?

[CapMan]

1. Measure and correct frequencies below transition area with the mic at listening position .
2. Measure and correct frequencies above transition ( 200-400 Hz ) with the microphone 1 meter from one of the loudspeakers.

I think we have mostly agreed on the last couple of pages that the Dirac development team are not idiots.

People have also made the point they are a commercial enterprise (grr - nasty capitalists!)

If the process you describe yields better outcomes for the user at home why would a commercial enterprise like Dirac hobble their product with an inferior approach giving less good results ?

Can’t imagine it would be beyond them to change their instructions, process and algorithms to have a user take measurements as you suggest. Strikes me it would likely be simpler than multi point sweeps around the MLP.

I’m not trying to be contrary, I’m genuinely interested to understand.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

Ofcourse its all about the money and there is a market for this which is shown in this thread . They cant make it to complicated for the customers.
Its no different than selling loudspeaker cables for 1000 dollars, but to be fair, Dirac really works as they say below the transition area.

And everyone can do corrections that makes the sound better with a good dsp , a soundcard and a measurement microphone, but you have to do it right:

1. Measure and correct frequencies below transition area with the mic at listening position .
2. Measure and correct frequencies above transition ( 200-400 Hz ) with the microphone 1 meter from one of the loudspeakers.

View attachment 347027

But that's not how you're supposed to use Dirac Live.. The program is expecting you to measure between 9 to 17 points at and around the sweetspot.
--Tightly focused imaging (9 points),
--Focused imaging (13 points), or
--Wide imaging (17 points)

I'd rather not recommend any other method than what the makers of the software tell you to do. Even if you in an epiphany suddenly think you know better.

 

[Tangband]

I think we have mostly agreed on the last couple of pages that the Dirac development team are not idiots.

People have also made the point they are a commercial enterprise (grr - nasty capitalists!)

If the process you describe yields better outcomes for the user at home why would a commercial enterprise like Dirac hobble their product with an inferior approach giving less good results ?

Can’t imagine it would be beyond them to change their instructions, process and algorithms to have a user take measurements as you suggest. Strikes me it would likely be simpler than multi point sweeps around the MLP.

I’m not trying to be contrary, I’m genuinely interested to understand.

I have no idea why they dont do that - I think goat76 has explained the only possible reason why they dont do it. They are intelligent people but it would hurt marketing If its to complicated for the customers.

 

[goat76]

I have never said that it's magic. Only that it works wonders for me. I'm against the concept of putting things in boxes in black or white theme. Especially just because one guy has written a book once. It reminds me of religion in a bad way and it seems to me like audiophile gibberish but from the other camp.. Like opposing something new you don't quite understand.

Toole may have written his book by himself, but do you suggest he didn't have a full team behind him in his research, and is there no one else in the field besides him who has ever come to the same conclusions as he has regarding how we hear direct sound vs reflective sounds in a room?

I don't know how Dirac Lives' calculations are done either. I can only relate to the result.

I do not know what they use for their calculations, but I don't think they can generate a direct sound curve out of a user's in-room measurements.

I took a look at the measurements @vicenzo_del_paris posted, and it's impossible to generate any direct response from his measurement as you can see in the picture below. So whatever it is that Dirac uses for their calculation, I don't think it can be the direct sound from the speakers.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

I think we have mostly agreed on the last couple of pages that the Dirac development team are not idiots.

People have also made the point they are a commercial enterprise (grr - nasty capitalists!)

If the process you describe yields better outcomes for the user at home why would a commercial enterprise like Dirac hobble their product with an inferior approach giving less good results ?

Can’t imagine it would be beyond them to change their instructions, process and algorithms to have a user take measurements as you suggest. Strikes me it would likely be simpler than multi point sweeps around the MLP.

I’m not trying to be contrary, I’m genuinely interested to understand.

It doesn't make any sense why they should purposefully make their product worse. Dirac Live is also used professionally where there is lots of hype and cash to be had for the best sounding software, I imagine. And even IF making quasi-anechoic measurements would result in better EQ in some cases, they might have come up with a solution that makes the hassle of doing them obsolete with diminishing returns. If the difference would be substantial, they'd probably have done it differently for the reasons already mentioned. <-- But now I am speculating..

 

[goat76]

I understand your points, but are ease of use and achieving a high quality result mutually exclusive?

My iPhone camera is a breeze to use, but the work that has gone into the software that drives it yields incredibly good and consistent results.

Honestly I think it’s a leap to suggest Dirac aren’t committed to sound quality, but just my option.

Have a great weekend

I think they are fully committed to sound quality but under the restrictions of ease of use.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

Toole may have written his book by himself, but do you suggest he didn't have a full team behind him in his research, and is there no one else in the field besides him who has ever come to the same conclusions as he has regarding how we hear direct sound vs reflective sounds in a room?



I do not know what they use for their calculations, but I don't think they can generate a direct sound curve out of a user's in-room measurements.

I took a look at the measurements @vicenzo_del_paris posted, and it's impossible to generate any direct response from his measurement as you can see in the picture below. So whatever it is that Dirac uses for their calculation, I don't think it can be the direct sound from the speakers.

I don't know how The Book had come to existence. All I know is that it always ends up in people parroting its contents like it's the one and only truth.
Personally I think some of its conclusions would be different if it was written at a time when room correction software was mature.

Okay. You took a look at the measurements and you concluded that you can't generate a direct response curve from the data.
I mean no harm and I am not writing anything here in anger, but has it crossed your mind that maybe a whole team or teams of dedicated engineers could come to any other conclusion? -Or that it's maybe not the method they use in their software?

 

[Haskil]

And yet, using Dirac is not simple at all... Neither is using Audyssey quite complex opposite...
Obviously less than doing everything manually to enter the corrections into a multiband parametric equalizer... and resolve by passive means the acoustic problems encountered above the Shroeder frequency of the room... But we can also, by anyway, use Dirac under 500 Hz only and Audyssey also...
The discussion around the idea: they seek to obtain the best possible sound versus they want to make money is quite insulting to the intelligence of the readers of these exchanges, like the one which consists of saying that they do the same something that cable sellers for 1000 euros...
Please not on ASR...

 

[sigbergaudio]

Which are brute force and which are not , it would useful info for people making a choice on the tool they use. Tnx

I don't have a comprehensive understanding and/or information about how the different systems work. But I have at least seen both Audyssey and ARC (Anthem) do strange things, but many of these systems evolve too, so what was true a few years ago may not be true today. Dirac I haven't got a lot of experience with, but it doesn't look completely crazy from the graph shared above. DSPeaker/Antimode is extreme careful above Schroeder, an approach I like. For most situations limiting yourself to tilt functions to adjust overall tonality is preferrable up high, in my personal opinion.

Then you have systems like Lyngdorf and Trinnov that are quite configurable, where it is up to the user to smart or stupid things. Both things are possible with both systems.

 

[sigbergaudio]

Correcting above Schroeder by measuring close to the speaker isn't necessarily a good idea either. Then you are putting on the speaker designer hat and are assuming you can do a better job than whoever built the speaker. This would likely be a false assumption for the vast majority of consumers.

 

[CapMan]

Correcting above Schroeder by measuring close to the speaker isn't necessarily a good idea either. Then you are putting on the speaker designer hat and are assuming you can do a better job than whoever built the speaker. This would likely be a false assumption for the vast majority of consumers.

I have a horribly asymmetric room - it certainly wouldn’t help me

 

[Deleted member 48726]

I have a horribly asymmetric room - it certainly wouldn’t help me

I have a semi opening to another room on one side. So not me either. I'm convinced I need the reflections to be able to correctly correct, so to speak.

 

[vicenzo_del_paris]

I have a semi opening to another room on one side. So not me either. I'm convinced I need the reflections to be able to correctly correct, so to speak.

Mine is a rectangle (7.5mx4mx2.5m) but one side is mostly windows bays (5m) and the back right corner is opened both on 2 other rooms (kitchen & main entrance). Not really good for acoustics

 

[CapMan]

As with most things on life I expect it’s about trade offs and going with the lesser of multiple evils.

 

[Tangband]

Correcting above Schroeder by measuring close to the speaker isn't necessarily a good idea either. Then you are putting on the speaker designer hat and are assuming you can do a better job than whoever built the speaker. This would likely be a false assumption for the vast majority of consumers.

Agree, one must know how to do it. How many amateurs have a really good measurement microphone +-1dB 20-20000 Hz at home, with a good sound interface and program ? How many of the Dirac users have even heard about baffle step correction ? It certainly helps if you have done measurements before and constructed a couple of speakers..

Maybe this is something that Dirac are aware of - its far to complicated for an average consumer to do it right the first time.

By the way, its ofcourse always much better to do acoustical damping above transition frequency than using digital dsp correction ( If the speakers are linear - they dont need any nearfield dsp correction above transition )

 

[CapMan]

Maybe this is something that Dirac are aware of - its far to complicated for an average consumer to do it right the first time.

Indeed, but i think it would be silliness to suppose that automated systems programmed by highly experienced specialists would not be capable of replicating and improving upon manual approaches - especially in a world where AI exists

 

[Haskil]

Correcting above Schroeder by measuring close to the speaker isn't necessarily a good idea either. Then you are putting on the speaker designer hat and are assuming you can do a better job than whoever built the speaker. This would likely be a false assumption for the vast majority of consumers.

Yet Amir, Maty and others do this for every speaker measured by Klippel published on ASR !
They therefore provide more or less refined paremetric corrections to be used to improve to a certain extent the performance of a speaker which has not always been developed according to the rules of the art for various reasons...

 

[Grandzoltar]

When looking at active speakers like genelec or Neumann. There is definitely eq happening throughout the whole frequency band to achieve such flat responses. I would like to see the raw tweeter data with no dsp compared to the finished product. If you want to amend a short coming of a freq response of a passive speaker at a particular frequency above shroeder what's wrong with that. It's what genelec and Neumann do to achieve the spins most people seem to drool over. At the end of the day it's your ears if it doesn't sound right it doesn't sound right. One particular practice is not the end all be all way. Experiment test measure but at the end of the day press play and enjoy yourself

 

[Grandzoltar]

When comparing the reference and eq graphs on spinorama.org you get an increase in tonality preference score along with more linear early reflections and sound power.

 

[Tangband]

Here are my measurements on axis of the Genelec 8340 SAM monitor in my livingroom 1 meter away using Line audio om1 microphone . This is a dsp corrected speaker that measures flat. This measurement is done in the middle of the room with a thick rug below the speaker, on a stand. Its an ordinary sine sweep with no gating.

As you can see, one can trust the measurements down to about 300 Hz even If you measure in a normal room if you have a good microphone.