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The Cucumber's Own "Advice" thread


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On 3/1/2020 at 6:22 PM, mitchco said:

Hi @One and a half yes, once you take the measurements, and happy with them, you are good to go, and can put the measurement mic away. Of course if you change speakers, speaker placement, listening position, etc., then you will need to measure again. Now that you have the measurements, you can play with the target response and try a partial correction from 600 Hz on down, or full range correction, different target curves, etc., and easily A/B them in Dirac Live Processor while listening to music. Once you have settled on what sounds best to your ears, it is set and forget and enjoy the music!

IMO it's misleading advice : we have to tune our in room response to the in room response in which the Art has been approved and we need several sets of filters targeting different target curves for that. They might have very different shapes (ie Harman RR 8dB vs B&K) and how they fit our room or tastes doesn't matter as much as how they are close to how the in room response in which the Art has been approved

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On 2/28/2020 at 9:45 PM, mitchco said:

It is not so much the direction and cues, which is indeed affected to a certain degree, it is more of the “comb filtering” that colours the frequency response is the main issue. I can’t show it because of copyright issues, but if you happen to have a copy of Bob Katz’s excellent book on Mastering, there are a couple of charts that show the frequency response comb filtering issues when, in his case, a mastering desk is placed between him and the speakers. Bob also adjusted the angle of the desk to minimize the comb filter to almost be the same as without the desk there.

 

When I “critically listen” I move my coffee table out of the way. Aside from the comb filtering colourations, I want to hear the full radiation pattern off the speakers for the best possible imaging. When I place the coffee table back, I can hear the comb filter coloration and the image height is reduced (i.e. the bottom half), by a bit, but since our ears/brains quickly adapt, it is soon forgotten and I am back to background music listening. I also have a “half back” couch as when I had a full back couch, it drove me nuts as I moved further back into the couch, I could easily hear the comb filtering from both channels reflecting off the couch and into my ears, aside from cutting off the ambient sound from behind me.

 

But the most important aspect is that if one corrects for the “comb filtering” off the coffee table for example, then that correction is now embedded in the frequency response of the loudspeaker including it's off axis response. We know from Sean Olive’s and Floyd Toole’s extensive work that a smooth off axis frequency response is just as important as smooth on axis response (think spinorama). So if we correct for the comb filter off the coffee table, we have just coloured the off axis response of the loudspeaker. So now the combination of the direct sound and early reflections in the listening window sounds “coloured” even sitting in the sweet spot and worsens when one moves around the room. This is one of the reasons why folks mistaken that it is the DSP that has coloured the sound when what they have done is coloured the off axis response, so the later reflections after the coffee table are coloured and to our ears does not sound right (and never will!).

 

There are no hard and fast rules, and I encourage folks to experiment. Having been using DSP extensively for a decade, these are some of my experiences.

For sure, the coffee table in the path can't bring anything good and if you get rid of it for critical listening you sure don't wan't it there for measurements.... 

You invite us to "Note that the precise placement of the mic to the location is not crucial" ; indeed Dirac's literature invites us to pick random locations far from your once published recommendations for “tape measure or laser distant measurer”. Can you elaborate ?

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On 2/28/2020 at 12:13 AM, mitchco said:

@ZapuanSorry for misunderstanding. If you know what you are doing, yes, because of additional features and/or exposing functionality for the user to control:

- create multi-way digital crossovers of varying types, slopes, you have complete control.

- linearize individual drivers.

- time align individual drivers.

- user control over frequency dependent windowing. Both low and high frequency window widths can be independently adjusted for both magnitude and excess phase correction.

- the amount of correction applied.

Maybe it's a good thing to not let you play with frequency dependent windowing or correcting the Amplitude on Vector Average. The Harman targets you refer to as well as the famous B&K are designed to correct responses to which no FDW has been applied. Applying documented targets to improper averages can only produce undocumented freaks. Please go back to the literature and consider reading attachment in 

 

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On 2/26/2020 at 3:30 PM, audiobomber said:

Finally, some evidence of why Dirac is better than REW. Looks like I need to upgrade. 5 stars!

 

I'm using REW with a miniDSP to integrate my subs. Anxiously looking forward to Part 2, Active Bass Management

 

PS As per my PM message, I'm hoping you can review the miniDSP SHD. The SHD Studio is also very interesting.

For fair comparison you need to combine RePhase to REW in order to address Time domain. Both are donation free but there's quite a learning curve. Questions :

Can we beat automated software such as Dirac by manual cumbersome operations?

Is it worth paying a trained third party to do it if we 're not feeling up to?

 

When using RePhase, we need to know crossovers frequency values (at least) ; wonder how Dirac proceeds ; maybe @mitchco can elaborate ?

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