Hello
Just out of interest how are you guys/girls doing? I myself probably go against the streem a little in my choices, however, I like the result at my home.
Regardless of whether you have Marantz, Anthem, Yamaha or other brand. do you use Audysseey, dirac or do you play movie/music without it?
@Thomas @Lukas – In the past I’ve used my UMIK-1 with DIRAC, and agree, it’s a hit or miss, but I could tweak what I felt was needed. That being said, I need to practice more with REW. : )
@Jimmy – I’m considering a second 1961 1V, just need to figure out how best to integrate it within the room as the room is on the small side. Although not perfect, my heights are sitting on top of my towers until a friend has the time to help me mount them to the ceiling, so I understand what you’re going through.
That’s the best thing about this hobby. It’s like you’re never done and you want to find new solutions to make things better :)
Room Calibration is needed when you have a complex room and want the best/worst in some cases sound from your rooms acoustics. Thats why treatment is needed to help get rid of those echos in the room and ambients that add to the rooms reverberations. Like most on here we don’t use it because it tends to weaken the sound and produce interference with the frequencies in the signal, but if your like Lucas and have the experience you can fine tune yourself and get the best possible outcome with or without your calibration.
Hi Jimmy, such a great question. I use a Denon 6700 and have used Yamaha. Currently with my Denon I am using the pre outs in full pre out mode (makes a huge difference in the voltage out to the amp/s). I spent quite a bit of time listening without room treatments/absorbers and really needed to run with the room eq on. I use the Denon app to see what the Denon is doing to my sound. I did run the room eq several times as I did get slightly different results that did make a difference. Today with room treatments, I prefer that the room eg only work with some of the lower freq, so I have set a curtain to gain the best of both worlds for my application. I plan to add a dsp for my subs so that in the near future i can run REW and make some bass management changes and not have any room correction on. So I suppose my answer is both yes and no for room eq. It’s a process and my goal is to us as little eq as possible so these amazing speakers and amps can do their thing with direct content. I made myself get real familiar with a couple songs and movie clips so that I could pick up on the smallest changes in my sound. I think that’s my favorite part, you are the room eq wizard. Great question, as you can see my answer has changed over time.
Room correction is almost needed in every room (if not treated by serious acoustic treatments or if you do not listen in a nearfield position in certain conditions). At least to correct room modes below the Schroeder frequency (generally below 300 Hz).
This is sound wawes physics and our objective is to hear close to what is in the record (well, that’s what Hi-Fi stands for).
The simplest way to do it is with “room calibration” softwares such as Audyssey or Dirac, and have a little understanding of what you are doing. This can be achieved by a few hours of reading when you start from scratch and by taking a solution where you can see and control what the software is doing (for instance, for Audyssey, you need the app).
This is the easiest way to dramatically increases sound quality in your main listening area.
Buying quality speakers/subs such as Arendals without dealing with the acoustics of the room in the listening(s) positions(s) is sincerely wasting money, time and not very respectful of the efforts of R&D that Arendal engineers have developped to create qualitative speakers :)
So nice to see so many people reply with their solutions and opinions. What’s so fun is that there is no yes or no answer to this question. More just interesting to read how you others are doing in your systems. After all, the sound is extremely individual and no one can tell someone else to turn EQ on because it sounds better or turn it off and so on. Everyone use what they think sounds good in their system, regardless of equipment. But one thing that is a common thread in all the answers is the acoustics!
I Hope more people answer how they do at home.
So nice to see so many people reply with their solutions and opinions. What’s so fun is that there is no yes or no answer to this question
Sorry, do not want to be arrogant. But there is an answer. It is yes/RC on, with knowing what your are doing.
Otherwise, there is almost 100 % of chances to have peaks or dips below 300 Hz.
Please trust me that once corrected, everybody prefers music/sounds without these major “acoustic flaws” due to the “transfer function of the room” (this is physics). To be franc, this is much more audible than the differences between 2 amps (provided there are “ok”) or 2 sets of speakers (provided they are at least “ok”… which is another point. All Arendal line is above OK).
Why do you think Arendal put a DSP with equalization capacities in theirs subs ??? To increase or decrease bass output ? yes but this can be done in another way. The real reason is in essence to adapt the bass register to the room (well to the place where you put the sub and where you listen to music). A software will do this automatically (and much better if you know how to use it, basically because it will develop other types of filters than the classical Eq filters of Arendal or other subs… which already can correct the “acoustic bass problems” with efficience). Why do you think Denon/Marantz/Yamaha and co put Audyssey/Dirac/or equivalent in their AVR ? They pay a licence for that which increases the price of their items.
Controling the room acoustic by a way or another is ESSENTIAL to hear a correct signal/music/sound in a room, particularly below 300 Hz. Again, this is simply the laws of wawes physics, how the things work…
There are very commonly peaks around 80-120 Hz in a classical room with speakers close to the wall ou coins (which is not intrinsically a bad thing if you control the “room gain”. These just sound awful/boomy once you’ve heard the music without them. Everybody will prefer music/sounds without them just because the music/sound mids are so much clerarer without. Voices, instruments start to play their music and not “the music of the room”. More clarity, less fatigue with more details, instruments/voices with closer timbres to the reality, better soundstage…
You can try to compare the signal/sound/music with what you hear in a “neutral” headphone (please neutral is important but this is another subject). You will immediately hear the effect of your room in the bass and the clarity you have with the headphone compared to the speakers if the “room is not corrected”.
The sound is individual, yes, but the best thing to do is to tune it from a clean base, i.e. with control of the room acoustics.
I only spoke of frequency response corrections in my previous messages. To be a bit more complete, Audyssey and co will also take into acount the distances of the speakers to the listening position and adapt the delays accordingly. This is also a very good thing (Dirac will also take care of phases…). All of these can manually be corrected provided you do correct measurements and have a DSP for correction. But it is time consuming and you have to know what you do. So much easier and often better with these dedicated solutions…
The parameters I systematically overule with Audyssey is the relative “volume” of the different channels. I generally decrease volume of the surround channels compared to the fronts. Especially for music, the dolby/dts upmixer put to much energy in the surrounds for my taste (well I am so used to stereo :) and i generally prefer simple stereo with stereo mixes ). This is much better when reading a native multichannel format mix where generally the volume settings given by Audissey work fine for me.
Best regards
From a tenants perspective(so someone without own property), i agree with pretty much everything you say. I think i spend as much money on room treatment for my living room as i spend on my speakers. Still i would need so much bass aborbing material to tame the low end that there would’t be any room left to live in anymore ^^ So in case you are not able to design/build the room from scratch or having a room so big, reflections won’t be a big issue anymore, you will be better off with any sort of electronic correction. And i arranged everything in my living room around the speakers, so the speakers are placed as symmetrical/optimal as it can be ^^
