Best room treatment

Hi OP:

I strongly suggest you treat your room first. It alters everything, and in a good way.  What choices and effort you put into your system without it may be moot, or wrong after.

So, any subwoofer solution will only alter frequencies below about 80 Hz. 

The average wall panel / diffusor however works in the mid to treble.

You want to limit early reflections, eliminate coherent reflections (i.e. echoes) and you want the decay of the sound in the room to be smooth and quick across all the audio bands.

In addition to lack of clarity, the extra time it takes for a signal to decay in a room alters the tonal balance, much like a tone control.  It's quite common in a modest living room for treatments to reduce the mid-treble energy, which also means the bass comes up.

A common report is "Wow my speakers sound so much bigger"

This may not be all you need, bass traps, EQ, or swarming, but I strongly encourage you to take the mid-treble room treatment seriously, and begin there.

Best,

E

OP:

Room EQ Wizard is free software. I’m not sure how much it has been extended, but originally it was free _measurement_ software, not EQ changes.

And no, it’s not the same. Regardless of the system, Dirac, Audessey, JL Audio, etc. all make different choices about what the final solution should be. I like some a lot more than I like others.

There is no absolute standard about what automatic room correction should do to any given system.  While there are publicly available algorithms that can measure and feed a DSP, the judgment about the final result is i nthe hands and ears of the programmers. 

Having said all of this, what they do, generally, really well, is set the crossover points, and levels between subs and the rest of the system.

Best,

E

Synergistic HFT are far more effective than old-school acoustic panels.

Bwahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha...

Advice, value, efficacy, selection:  GIK.

Their panels are relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to say ASC.

They have a number of products which are unusually effective at low frequencies.  These are among their priciest offerings, but again, cheaper than ASC and IMHO, sound better. They are tuned more broadly and the result, when used with care, is a more transparent response.

They also now have art panels, allowing you to get get panels to match any decor.