Analog room correction for vinyl

chakster, there are certainly reasons to use room treatment. There are areas where it will work better than digital correction. As for standing waves digital correction will make the frequency response at the listening position flat but as you move away you are still going to get the same undulations maybe even worse at some places. Avoiding this requires room design and appropriate sub woofer set up. All this works together to achieve the best results. What DSP gives you, complete control over the entire frequency range, accurate time alignment between speakers and drivers regardless of their position in the room and complete distortion-less control over crossovers can not be done any other way. I use all three methods, actually four. I use speakers that have inherent in their design less interaction with the room, a room designed for flat bass response, room treatment at critical first reflection points and DSP control.  www.audiovero.de/en/acourate.php I encourage people to go here and download trial samples of the program and play around. 

millercarbon, since I can't believe your ears are that bad I can only assume that you have not had more than trivial exposure to more than the most basic room control systems/programs. It does not matter what the source is. We are not talking about CD resolution. The best room control systems ( really do not like that term) run in 64 bit programs 384 kHz. It is a lot more than just frequency response. As most of us know perfectly flat frequency response usually does not sound so hot. Those of us who have been working with this for a while use different response curves for different situations. As an example if the recording is to harsh (sibilant) I kick in a curve with a 3 kHz notch filter. All this can be done on the fly with a remote control. Most important is that the frequency response of both channels is exactly identical. You can not get the best imaging without this and there is no other way to do this. You will never get two loudspeakers of the same model to have exactly the same frequency response even if you put them in the same location forget about putting them in different locations. Once you are in the digital domain you can literally do anything you want without distortion of any kind. Subwoofer integration any other way is folly. You can not accurately time and phase align any other way. And, the fun of it is that you can see exactly what is going on right in front of you on the computer. You want to know what happens when you boost 10 kHz 3 db? Tell the computer what you want and have a listen. Any curve any cross over right at your disposal. A properly set up digital correction system will sound much better regardless of the program source. I think the problem is that with the best, most flexible systems there is a steep learning curve and you just have to sit down and work with it for several months to get fluid. You can also screw things up big time which I'm sure leads to some of the negative impressions. There are also other advantages. Having lived with this for 20 years or so I can walk up to a strange system and know to a large degree where it's failings are which does not mean I can fix them as usually in strict analog there is not way to do this. None of us used any of the analog EQ systems in the day as they all caused more damage than good. You can also set up a complex system without any analog crossovers at all and use any frequency or order you like. I do not have a single analog crossover in my system.  

Chakster, I collect records also. I hate CDs in their flimsy plastic cases. All my digital in on a hard drive. Like I said I do not care how much "crap" you put on your walls. You will NEVER get the same performance out of a system w/o digital control and any person with a computer and a calibrated microphone can show that to you in real time and I guarantee your jaw will drop 3 feet when you see what your system is actually doing particularly the difference between channels. If you don't want to learn exactly how "crappy" your system is performing and what little it takes to straighten it out fine but that does not mean others here don't want to learn about it. I can understand being a traditionalist. I prefer being an early adapter. As a hobby it is more fun. Like I said, with a little digital tweaking and a little room treatment you can throw all that other "crap" away. I apologize if you are computer phobic. We do have medicine for that:)  

Back to the Acourate, all the functionality is there in spades. I would have to work with it for a while to get use to it and I am not yet sure what the hardware requirements would be other than a dedicated computer, 4 DAC channels for a 2.2 system, a calibrated microphone and an ADC for converting analog sources. You would also need switching for digital sources and a unified volume control. Certainly getting it all in one unit like the Trinnov Amethyst would be a lot simpler but at first glance it looks like the Acourate is more flexible and $11K buys a lot of hardware.(the price of the Amethyst + microphone) 

chakster, that is simplistic to be polite not that appropriate use of acoustic treatment is not indicated, it is. But no matter how much crap you tack on your walls floors and ceiling you can not do 1/10th of what good digital room control can do like time align the individual speakers and correct frequency response so that it is absolutely identical in both channels not to mention digital bass management. I just got turned on to this program which at first glance looks pretty hot.   https://www.audiovero.de/en/acourate.php

jgreen19, simple. You use an analog to digital converter to digitize the signal coming from your phono amp then you deal with it like any other digital format. I have been doing this for some 15 to 20 years. The conversion is in 192/24. My preamp is digital and has the room correction and bass management in it. I use an external Benchmark ADC for the phono amp which is an ARC. The benefits of room control (which is really speaker control) and digital bass management far out weight the loss in the analog to digital conversion and back if any.