Video starts at 2:30 ;)

I use Dirac in my system, wich is a high end one, and it works very very well. I use with my PC. It makes A LOT of difference. I totally recomend it

WOW! I think we were in Columbus at the same time! I think I listened to you! I was just transferred there from Atlanta as a Rep of audio including Marantz to cover S. Ga and the panhandle of Fla. The PX buying was done at Ft Benning as well. And the head of it lived next door. I lived by a big cow! You should remember it! I sold to local dealers that advertised with you. Moved to Nashville from there.

This is basically spot on with my experience, anytime I tried to correct the full range of the speaker, It just didn't sound right, even if it was measuring properly. But when I put all the effort into the sub 120hz area, man I got stellar results, no annoying boomy or overly punchy sound and especially being the same level right down to about 28hz. I currently have GoldenEar Triton 3's and a cheap Behringer amp with DSP built in, but man taking some time to do that improved the sound 10 fold. Hoping to upgrade to a nicer amp and a miniDSP HD in the future, but the sound I'm currently hearing is basically spot on what I enjoy

For years I was not a fan of room correction until I tried Audyssey xt32, then I was sold on the idea that it could work well. I did the measurements at around head height across the 3 or so seating positions on the lounge chair we have and I think it did a great job.

This is what I do and it works very well if you take your time. You play a test CD with test tones at each basic frequency through your left and right speakers with the subwoofer off. You calibrate and set the level for 75db @ 1K using an analog SPL meter at your listening position. This will be your reference point. Then play your bass, mid and treble frequency sweep tones writing down the spl levels above and/or below the 75 db @ 1K reference. Anything above the reference are peaks and anything below are dips at each respective frequency. Now you can use a Behringer UltraCurve Pro for example to lower or raise the frequency response. I like using the parametric eq file in the Behringer because the amount of octave adjustments are amazing. This test will give you a general idea of what your room is doing and the frequency response of your speakers in your room. Once you dial in the front speakers, you can test the subwoofer. I use a subwoofer test disc to get an idea of how low it will play at reference levels for home theater as well as peaks which in my case, I have that annoying 50hz peak. It won't ever be perfect doing it this way but you can dial your system in pretty good to taste using the Behringer.

My room is really not ideal, and Dirac Live did wonders to my sound. My stereo imaging is much better, its now correctly centered. My bass is now pretty flat and tight and it just sounds amazing. Absolutely recommended if your room is kinda shit to begin with, and you cant put too much acoustic treatments in the room.

Totally, its for taking away the peaks and not filling the deep valleys, walk speakers for the least room interaction.

Excellent explanation Paul. I have a Meridian system which only deals with the low end (I can't remember the cut off frequency) and it works very well. In my work as a recording studio engineer, I have used pro audio solutions that require the use of an expensive measuring microphone, and software that averages multiple response tests. Keep in mind that correcting the low end works because it is non-directional. Trying to correct mid and upper frequencies that the room is affecting also affects the direct sound coming from the speakers. This will only work if the adjustments are minor as you pointed out. Thanks again.

The measurement microphone gets positioned in designated places around the listening position both behind and in front, to the left and to the right, both high and low. And the measurement sweeps have to be done in order at the correct designated positions in order for the software to correctly calculate adjustments. It also makes sweeps from only the left channel and then the right. It's not just done from one microphone position.

Regarding your Mic comments, in this instance (Lingdorf room perfect) you measure at many positions, starting with the main seat. The more the merrier in fact. Not limited in position/s like systems of the past. Indeed, each time the amp tells you how well it has learned the 'whole room' as a percentage.

If you have a large room, consider a line array spk system and use some room correction at the listening position.

He answers the qustion @2:48.

Awesome info. Thanks so much! Will be putting this into practice.

If you stream using Roon software there is a parametric equaliser built in. I have calculated my room modes in the bass and set up steep band stop filters at the peaks and I find the bass is much improved with no discernable minuses. I probably wouldn't use room correction for high frequencies though. A physical absorber/reflector at the first reflection point is the best answer for problems higher up.

I like the Genelec The Ones GLM room correction. What about Linn Akurate Katalyst Room Correction or Meridian DSP Speakers correction not to mention B&O?

How sweet would it be if a speaker would email a report indicating there are X problems, Y have been compensated, and Z cannot be corrected. If the report included details of the problems, you could reposition some things in the room, maybe try some different corner treatments, and retest. Might be a setup dream come true.

I recently heard a Lyngdorf TDAI 2170 with Room Perfect built in (on home loan). Enables calibration with a good 2.1 system. I was very impressed. I am currently a tube guy with Room treatments. It was quite an eye opener, as I have an odd shaped space I have to work with.

I spent 1968 running the recording studio at Ft Benning (on the 1st floor of the infantry school). It was great duty for me because they let me do what I thought sb done. The major that ran the sound branch stopped by almost every day on his way up to the Chief of Operations office on the 5th floor, he left his cover and keys on my desk. One day on his way out of the building ge came back to get his cover and car keys but grabbed the wrong hat. I had to go up to the sound section to get something one day so I closed the studio up anf headed across the airborne field up yo main post. As i walked along I started to get salutes from soldiers and officers along with some strange looks. i peeled off the cap and found a majors oak leaf cluster and that meant the major was walking around with my hat with it's SP5 badge on it. That badge was supposed to be flat black but the paint started to flake off revealing the copper base ,metal so polished it up and wore polished copper SP5 badges to denote my rank, I never got called on that when in Benning or Korea - it was my way of rebellling against the army. Another way was wearing a bright orange scarf (signal corps colors) when standing formal fatigue inspection. The major did call me on that and I told him I was signal corps and not infantry he told me I was a PITA and told me to carry on. The effect was pretty starting, hundreds of sky blue scarves with a dozed bright orange ones at one end. IMO the old fatigues were much better looking tha the crap they wear now, desert camo is fine for Iraq but not so much for Korea. The major and I exchanged hats that afternoon, He didn't even realize he had the wrong hat. That major was a good commander and his boss (bird colonel) was as well, as long as you did your job they pretty much left you alone and they took umbrage at any officer who tried to pull chicken shit discipline on their men

If you make the adjustments in the digital domain before the DAC PREAMP and AMP then yeah it’s going to be a dream. Ideally you’d place the speakers for the flattest response first then fine tune with room correction and use the mic in the seating position.

I Realize this is an older KZfaq video. But many of the issues you had with digital room correction have been mitigated with Room Perfect. I was totally against anything that messed with my beloved signal. But Room Perfect is changing my opinion.....

What is that huge box which we see in the video on the right side?

You crack me up, Paul, in a good way.

Great videos!... I like the sound of them without the lav mic tough...

Paul...I'm worried... nearly every morning I wake up, make my tea, then settle down to watch the latest PS vid... If, there isn't one... I suffer cold turkey... lol I'm not rich enough to buy top end stuff, so I'm currently saving for a Stellar system... You have, over the years brainwashed me in wanting to become one of the PS. clan ... lol Frank... PS. Excuse the pun... Designing my new listening room at home!

i get it ..if there are sound problems DRC will only help in one spot (microphone)or if the issue was REAL BAD

Often times in your videos, there's a bottle of blue Windex. I once had a horrible outcome and now only use the clear Windex. Have any white cabinets been ruined in your shop?

I use a DBX Driverack Venu360 in a very small room (height is less than 5"10'). It drives two Yamaha HS8 monitors + Yamaha HS8S powered subwoofer. Sounds great for video and modest mixing, but I must admit that I am no audiophile. Would love to see the DBX compared with Dirac Live, Audyssey, and other room correction methods.

It's great for trims and delays and correction up to the Shroeder frequency. Don't use above that unless you have a really funky room.

I've seen really good examples of digital audio processing improving the audio fidelity but also the opposite. You have to understand what is wrong before you start fixing it. Always try to fix the root cause first. For example, if the speakers have a terrible frequency response with big dips then the speakers are the problem and adding EQ to compensate might create audible harmonic distortion at those frequencies when the amp can't deliver the dynamics at that frequency. E.g. if you have a 800Hz dip of 15dB and you boost it 15dB with an EQ you probably feel it sounds better at low volumes but at higher volumes, your amp just lost 15dB of its dynamic range at 800Hz where you will hear clipping before any other frequencies in the music. But then, if you fixed such problems by root cause (speakers and room acoustical conditions), there CAN be some additional performance gained by tweaking through a DSP e.g. delays and frequency response. Actually a surround setup needs delay settings or you will have serious problems with the sound stage.

It works great for home theaters - high end audio ... ?

Audyssey MultEQ XT is fantastic- and that's just the budget version of Audyssey. I have a cheap amplifier, a cheap pair of JBL speakers, and a cheap subwoofer that sound "okay" without correction. With correction, the subwoofer disappears (sounds like bass is coming from the L/R speakers), the phantom center image sharpens up, and the bass sounds fuller and deeper. Without correction, I have to turn down the subwoofer so much that it's basically off in order to tame the peaks, and the upper mids and trebble are way too harsh.

I think you want to do it below the critical frequency of the room. Most rooms are like 250hz.

For 2 Channel Stereo I use a pair of 1/3 octave, old style graphic EQ's and do it by ear. Man beats machine. For 9.3.4 Home Theatre, I wouldn't have a clue. Machine beats man.

Hahaha..can you show us a photo of you when young and with long hair? It would be sooo cooool...cheers

I have tried Audyssey and AccuEQ, but their results are a bit hard to respect when their determination of speaker distance can be proven wrong with a tape measure.

Not even a mention of Dirac. I guess we won't find it implemented in any of PS Audio's electronics.

Is it not true that digital room correction is really in the realm of sound re-enforcement? Church's, performance halls and Movie Auditoriums? Dolby Atmos uses a lot of it. I am lucky to live quite close to a brand new Dolby Atmos Digital Audio ( I counted at least 32 speakers ) and Laser projection movie theater. It's very impressive.

There is a genuine digital amplifier, note the words. That say it have the extra needed dynamic to do it properly.

I have a McIntosh MEN 220......It certainly changes the sound, I will give it that, but it literally sucks the life/palpability out of the music. I am very happy with the 'in-room' sound.

Digital signal processing is the only way to remove room nodes from a speaker system. FIR filtering is pretty transparent to the signal path if it is a good quality processor (something like a AD Sharc processor). Using FIR's on signals lower than 100 Hz is not practical due to the massive amount of delay it takes to process those long wave lengths which makes the whole system laggy and lethargic. The only way FIR makes sense is >100 Hz. If implemented correctly, it's a lovely thing.

I love sobarworks on my jbl lsr305 ..eye opening :)

You are such a rebellion, Paul. ;)

did you just say Giorgio Moroder? WOW. what happened later?

The tech seems to have come a long way.

If a room (like my current one) is really bad as in an acoustical engineer's nightmare, no amount of any correction will help and the only way to correct is to move. For everyone else that has a room with at least 3 walls, carpet and at least two corners, I look at it this way. There is no such thing as perfect in audio. I will never understand the pursuit of such by folks. Will digital room correction alone solve my issues with sound? No. Will set-up alone do it? No. Will room treatment alone do it? no. It really requires all three or at least two of the three to solve some issues. All three will not even get you close to perfect either. In using digital room correction myself for multi-channel audio for some years, I have to agree with Paul. For sub-woofer or sub-woofer placement it works very well as it does for the lower frequencies in the main speakers. As for the highs and high-mids....uh, not so much. For two-channel audio which I will be switching back to in the coming months, I won't use digital correction at all as I feel it will just make more of a mess in that case. In my present case, all I can do is proper placement. If I move and get a different room (making sure it is not even worse than the one I have, if that is even possible), then I will use both set-up and a little bit of room treatment. (Another area I see many folks mess up, trying to turn their room into an anechoic chamber or something.

This is why I love the JBL MS-8 processor in my car. For each seating position, it takes 6 measurements for a spatial average at each spot. (you sit in each seat with a set of binaural mics on your head that look like headphones) Then it can optimize the sound for each seat, the front seats together, the rear seats or all seats together. And it works!

What about. How is the McIntosh MEN220 ?

First, you need really high quality DSP to not degrade your sound quality for even small eq cuts and boosts. If you are dealing with 10-30db of cuts and boosts, you are certainly going to encounter phase distortion or loss of impulse response (linear phase equalizer) and/or ringing of some kind. And if you are using an analog or DSD source, you are basically throwing any sonic advantages of those formats out the window. I would not consider this a good high fidelity solution.

Using a Lyngdorf TDAI-3400 amplifier which enables Room Perfect. That is what the name promises.

in my house Lyngdorf Dpai 3400 sda-2400 Sonus faber Cremona m lyngdorf w-210 perfect With Room perfect :-)

Luckily it can be turned on and off so that you can decide for yourself. Maybe it’s useful in some rooms but It has always sounded worse for me.

First you should do your placement and acoustics properly, only then you can get room corrections really shine! If your acoustics sucks, there is no way, that any ARC can fix it.

Good one, Paul. In my setup... when I am playing from Jriver I have used REW to make my own corrections, and tried them against the auto corrections etc... and I always end up coming back to no correction. Which just serves to reinforce my commitment to room treatments etc. And I have gotten sorta really close (the sound is really really good)... but the bass mode is strong here and really hard to kill, and my room is not much different in size than your RS5 room, I have no idea how you deal with the bass from 12 big woofers... And the room correction, no, the entirety of the circuitry for room correction in my Integra 80.1 degrades the signal just turning it on, so I have every single feature of the Integra turned off...

Tippical Paul: "It only works well when we do it"

A dedicated amplifier and speaker system should alleviate much of the problem. Yes, adding 30db to a driver already putting out 90db would be a real problem. No more headroom being the most obvious. But a dedicated speaker system could be set up to do the job. Yes, it's going to be more expensive and more complex. But it won't punish your speakers and amp. I've been toying with the idea for 20 years now, but never took the plunge. I think my biggest problem is that my system is all analog - with digital sources converted to analog right away and then processed. And if I'm going to go digital, then I'm going ALL digital, all the way to just before the amp. Which means replacing nearly everything - a rather expensive prospect. And I can never quite find exactly what I want.

Yup. I agree with everything said. SBIR (speaker boundary interference response) can cancel certain frequencies and no amount of room correction signal adjustment is going to bring them back. Physical room correction is the only thing that can be done for those missing frequencies. The biggest impact on music reproduction quality is first, speaker quality, and secondly speaker placement in the room, and acoustic treatment considerations, which is why sometimes it is just quicker, cheaper, and easier to use headphones, but then you lose out on proper stereo imaging, unless you do some amount of channel crossover to mimic stereo speakers.

Any time Paul McGowan and Gene DellaSala agree about something, I will take it to the bank. Good stuff.

6:55 conclusion :)

I suspect that psycoacoustics comes into play. I think that our brains are good enough at recognizing room deficiencies and compensating for them, that in most cases we don't need much (if any) additional compensation. My mind seems to be better at compensating for reflections than long-duration standing waves and room resonances. This aligns with what Paul discussed regarding removal of peaks in the low frequency region. I tend to take a minimalist approach to audio reproduction. I think DSP can be used as another tool to synergistically improve LF reproduction. It's not much different than adjusting port length, damping material and enclosure bracing. For those interested in FIR filters, here is a link to a good resource: www.prosoundtraining.com/2013/09/06/fir-ward-thinking-fir-filters-audio-systems/

digital room correction is good, proper acoustic treatment is better. both is golden. and as you said, only cut, don't boost. and that it only works for bass isn't an issue, caus that's where all the problems are.

i have dirac live in my receiver Arcam , tried it many times with calibrated microphone with mic placed exactly in my listening chair sweet spot , then i turn it on and off and on and off etc..... i even played with the stock curve to make it more to my taste , every time i came back to Stereo direct with dirac live OFF it sounded better in my room without the Dirac room correction , so i gave up and now am just listening without it by just placing speakers more accurately and i place diffusers on side walls and rear wall

Maximum desired listening volume is not taken into consideration by any digital room correction technology. If for example a speaker can play very well down to 80hz without distortion at up to ~60% maximum ever desired listening volume, it's a sound quality waste having the room correction set up the speaker at ~160hz and make it play without distortion at max 100% volume if a user never exceeds ~60% volume.

Hi Paul, I do agree with you. I have listened to the Dutch Kii speakers just before they went on sales. I compare them with mine wich are (new) stacked esl57, townshend tweeters, a pair of rel strata2 and a Lectron Jean Hiraga tube amp. So nothing fancy. Roomsize 6m by 5m. What i noticed is that the Kii are probaly measured much better than mine. But... there is something about the 'air' or liveness in the sound wich is different and somewhat unrealistic. It didn't touch me. I think that if a person takes more time for its loudspeaker placement (hobbies may take sometime) and a little adjustmends over time to your room can do little wonders. A bought a Bosch laser centimeter which helps and after 3 months of trial and error, its sounds pretty ok and acceptable for the moment. Good luck and thank you for teaching us dumbo's haha. Oscar (1965), The Netherlands .

Yes Manual Correction is best. But what about the Mystery Bass Wind that comes out of now where and scares the crap out of people?

Officer: I know just what to do with you, my sneaky little audiophile. Paul: I'm not afraid of you. Officer: Send him to Columbus! Paul: Columbus?!? No! Not Columbus...

I disagree . . . I use a DBX DriveRack PA2, and it has done wonders in allow me to tweak my speakers. I have been able to take a female voice that has an awful edge to it and through careful listening and delicate adjustment, cause my speakers to reproduce that voice and other high deficiencies. You can disagree -- don't care . . . it worked for me and another audiophile with an expensive system, and that is all that matters . . . customer satisfaction.

Acoustic treatment,bass traps, diffusers, tend to be way more effective and often(specially if you DIY)cheaper,DSP has its place though. If most speakers didnt have such poor off axis response...well thats another bone....

Room treatment always trumps dsp correction. But in small rooms when you get a crazy loud bass frequency ringing you physically can't fit a enough treatment in the room. I think for a tiny room like a small office dsp correction is one of the better options.

.........TRINNOV

Grouping all room correction system together makes no sense. This video is based on out of date information.

You were wearing a wig in the army and you were Christopher Robin? What is even happening?

I’ll settle this one quick, fast and in a hurry. Digital room correction sucks. Period. You’re welcome 😉

mistake Paul to use DSP go to ASP much better that's where everybody will be going that's what Andrew Jones has done. why destroy a analogue signal and convert it to a digital signal you're just alienating analogue enthusiast. DSP is the poor brother of ASP

Acoustic room treatment is probably cheaper and infinitely preferable to the cost and quality of DSP required for transparent correction, LOL

WTF ? You were kicked out of Germany during your Period with Giorgio Moroder? Puh, for me this would be a great pain in the Ass... But - do you have still Contact to Giovanni Giorgio?

Just have your damn room built rightr & your speakers in hte right place. Digital room correction is more bs for the bull sitters.