Room Correction Hardware

Does the MiniDSP you’re looking at include Dirac Live? Dirac is very powerful and capable of great results, but it is a bit of a steamroller approach with the default target curve, which essentially corrects your room and equally your speakers according to the pre-determined curve. It is very flexible though, you can create any target curve you want, although it can be a bit of a rabbit hole. What is often best is restricting the frequency correction to just the bass region, as that is where the majority of room issues seem to occur. The one issue with Dirac though is that you can’t turn off the ‘impulse response’ correction, even if you want to. Theoretically, there ought to be no reason why you’d ever want to, as it’s a pretty clear cut better/worse situation, but I have heard people saying they preferred the sound of their system without it.

If it doesn’t have Dirac, then that’s a whole other ballgame. They are incredibly powerful tools, but you’ve got to work out all of the corrections to apply yourself by measuring using REW. Unless you’re already an expert with REW and have a great deal of time on your hands then I would think twice. I read these threads sometimes where people seem to to be continuously measuring, tweaking and re-measuring, but I just don’t know how anyone with a family and/or job (and wants to sit down and just listen to some music at some point) has the time!

I’ve got Dirac Live built into my AVR (just used as a processor) and I’m happy to just let it take its blunt instrument approach as the room where I have my home cinema is pretty awful acoustically. I just applied a +4db Harman target curve (bass lift) as I found the default Dirac target curve a bit bass-light for movies. It makes a tremendous difference in my room.

What I really like is the RoomPerfect system built into my Lyngdorf amp in my 2ch system. It’s so quick and easy to run and it’s an ingenious system that helps your speakers work with your room and doesn’t change their characteristics according to a pre-defined target. Unfortunately only built in to Lyngdorf amplifiers, so not really a stand-alone solution for you. They did used to do a standalone unit which still pops up on ebay from time to time, but people generally want too much money for them. MacIntosh also do one with RoomPerfect licensed from Lyngdorf, but that’s just silly money for exactly the same system that you can get built into an Integrated amp starting from £2K.

Kevin

I will share my observations of room correction for you which dates back before Lyngdorf's early 2000's efforts I was involved in a car version of an early DEQ type affair which gave great control within individual driver (up to four per speaker) levels, x/over points (down to 1Hz adjust ability with time alignment feature of +/-28m/s)

Pro's can help significantly with really poor acoustic environments, silly rear storage cases, low ceilings and very small space between the back wall and the speaker position plus a whole host or other room issues.

Correctly set up with a RTA they can delivery pin point imaging speakers will totally disappear and much better instrument separation. Also again if used correctly they can significantly reduce grain in the system all really plus points

For myself this method, removes the big attraction of why I listen to music, a natural fluid presentation that doesn't feel it has been manipulated into its great imagining position. To me its feels mechanically contrived.

Don't get me wrong it can work very well and we have a number of clients who use a similar but more advanced systems however these guys are all large box count multi speaker home cinema systems where time propagation is absolutely critical.

Many years ago in another life (lol) I used horn loaded drivers (yes really image dynamics horns they were called) inside one of my vehicles and with a full suite of DSP that delivered  Freddie Mercury could signing to you through the central point of the  windscreen to you quite amazing!

That set up lasted a couple of years before I went back to custom three ways and passive x/overs why? because it was just so much more natural.

Rather than using the digital domain, you could look at a parametric equalizer which does things in the analogue domain. These days when we are constructing a full on large scale home cinema system we use as little DSP as humanly possible, correctly position the speakers from scratch (great if you are involved in the build I realise!) We also build up to 14 channel analogue pre-amplifiers so we preserve the signal integrity as much as realistically possible.

Bottom line is that they can work really well with room issues without question and for some people are a real godsend if moving room is not an option. But not the last word in reality and naturalness.