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First let me say congratulations to Chris on a wonderful site as he has built a great resource and attracted a wonderful community (and a belated congratulations on your 1 year anniversary). Anyways I ran across this article at AnandTech:

 

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=3467&p=1

 

It seems they are going to do a series on audio systems. Anyways I'm curious to know what this community thinks of the DIY DACS and PC-based digital room correction.

 

 

 

Thanks

Bryan

 

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Hi Bryan - Thanks very much for the kind words about this site. Praise is always appreciated :-)

 

Thanks for the link as well. DIY DACs are something I've never looked into. Mainly because there are companied who've spent millions in R&D money to develope DACs and I figure I'll just "outsource" this area to them and purchase a unit off the shelf. Of course that takes the fun out of doing it yourself, but this is my preferred method for DACs. PC based digital room correction has enormous potential, but it will have to get over the huge hurdle of acceptance by the audiophile community. I hope it succeeds.

 

One more note about DIY DACs. I'd love to see an open source hardware DAC come out. People could tweak the firmware and everything else as they want. Then we could all download different configurations and put them on the DAC. With many smart audio minds around the world fiddling with this we could get some great sound I have no doubt. Sure it's not the end all be all, but it's pretty cool in my book.

 

Founder of Audiophile Style | My Audio Systems AudiophileStyleStickerWhite2.0.png AudiophileStyleStickerWhite7.1.4.png

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Read the article, interesting but boy do they make it all sound so much effort. Any rational human being would just read that, blow air through their teeth, roll their eyes and then just buy a new $200 CD player.

 

I felt physically and mentally drained after reading it.

 

Not a good enticement to PC audio.

 

 

 

Meridian 551 amp / Meridian 507 CD / Zune Mk1

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  • 1 month later...

Dear Brian,

 

I read this article too when it was published on Anandtech.

The possibilities are endless when we can use DRC in our playback.

Advanced coumputer users know about color profiles for you printer, monitor, camera etc....

What if we can make a "acoustics" profile from our room and use it in streaming media from a NAS.

This would mean we have to duplicate our original rip's but then corrected by this profile and use these for playback.

Whenever you move your furniture around or move to another room or house you have to create a new acoustic profile, recreate a room corrected copy and you are always sure your sound is optimal.

Ofcourse you will need twice the storage space on your NAS, or keep the original rip's in the computer and the corrected ones on your NAS.

The basics look simple but I have never tried this at home or do I have all the needed hard and software.

The idea is cool ... I think ..

 

Oystein

 

 

Rigelian iOS app -> BeagleBone Black with Botic driver + Linux MPD + XPEnology NAS -> Soekris dam1121 DAC I2S direct from BBB -> DH Labs Revelation -> NAD C162 -> DH Labs Revelation -> Odyssey Khartago Plus -> DH Labs Q10 -> Boenicke Audio W5

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having a PC program perform digital room correction would truly be a nice feature.

 

Actually there are digital room correction systems available today. Components designed by Lyngdorf are a good example.

 

However, room correction performed in the digital domain as described by Oystein is in reality remastering the recording. Therefore one would need a separate new master file for each dB level, because we perceive different frequencies differently at different dB levels.

 

A computer used for performing room correction after the digital conversion to an analog signal is quite possible. Ultimately, it's all about the analog signal delivered by the speakers.

 

Daphne

 

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Dear Daphne,

 

As I understand creating a DRC profile is not related to the actual volume but to the volume at different frequencies relative to eachother.

As soon as you have your frequency response flat from 20-20kHz with a measuring microphone we are on the right track.

That we perceive some variantion related to the volume can be true but I would not be surprised if this perceiption varies a little from person to person. So it will be impossible to get it really straight for everybody.

I see Lyngdorf is hardware (nice hardware BTW) but what I was thinking of is a software solution as done by Anandtech.

 

Oystein

 

 

Rigelian iOS app -> BeagleBone Black with Botic driver + Linux MPD + XPEnology NAS -> Soekris dam1121 DAC I2S direct from BBB -> DH Labs Revelation -> NAD C162 -> DH Labs Revelation -> Odyssey Khartago Plus -> DH Labs Q10 -> Boenicke Audio W5

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I am still running XP Pro.

Need the DRC sofware first anyway but thanks for the tip. It makes upgrading XP to Vista more interesting.

 

Rigelian iOS app -> BeagleBone Black with Botic driver + Linux MPD + XPEnology NAS -> Soekris dam1121 DAC I2S direct from BBB -> DH Labs Revelation -> NAD C162 -> DH Labs Revelation -> Odyssey Khartago Plus -> DH Labs Q10 -> Boenicke Audio W5

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  • 6 months later...

I went thru the process of installing and implementing digital room correction on my vista pc that I use for listening on occasion. My observations:

 

Good - a real improvement in the sound, clearly and immediately audible, unlike cables, DACs. You do not have to listen carefully to hear the improvement. Results - better imaging, smoother sound, particularly in bass, but throughout mids and highs as well. You listen thru the system back to the recording in the most transparent way I have heard yet, and I have been an audiophile since the days of Large Advents. Free. Pure software solution.

 

Bad - a real hassle to set up - documentation too technical for most users. Command line programs. Multiple pieces to fiddle with. So revealing that bad mixes call attention to themselves. My setup is just for me sitting in front of the computer with my head between the speakers. Not sure how it would work in a more typical listening room. Test tones can fry your speakers.

 

If you go to DRC wikipedia you will find all the links you need to download the DRC software and other tools you need for free.

 

Have fun. If you are an audiophile and computer geek, it is worth it. This would be a fantastic setup for a recording engineer who sits between the monitors on either side of the computer. My monitors and subwoofer are decent but mid-fi but when in the sweet spot and with DRC turned on sound like a million bucks.

 

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I had an Ergo which licences the Lyngdorf Room Perfect technology up to 500Hz. With box speakers (Harbeth C7's) it worked brillantly (tighter bass,better imaging, less nodal interaction). With Open Baffle dipoles it was abit of a disaster. I haven't tried one with my Quad ESL's but will do when a friend brings his over. He uses it to integrate his SF standmounts and his REL sub. Works very very well for that.

It unfortuantely forces you to use their onboard dac (an AKM 4396 - more or less the same as the Transporter) which, while pretty good, wasn't great. The firewire firmware was also a little flakely. I think they have fixed this. I just ran spdif from a modded SB3.

Remarkable value for what it is.

Cheers

A

 

Best Wishes

Andrew

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