Digital Room Correction vs Room Treatments

Room treatment is as much about reverb time (Rt) as frequency variations, particularly in frequencies above 100hz. You don't want sound bouncing around your room. Below 100 is a different story. EQ can help there. 

Diffusion and absorption can help minimize frequency variations above 100hz as well as get Rt down below 300ms, or about 1/3 second. 

Below 100 hz, Speaker placement and subs are the better solution. EQ is most useful below 80hz. Your room is a system like your components. You have to work with various elements to optimize it. REW can help but I find a real time analyzer to be important as well. With a live 1/3 octave display, you can walk around your room with a calibrated Mic and see what's going on. Then you can try different solutions and both measure and more importantly, hear the results. 

Room treatment including where the gear is located is a cure.

EQ, correction, etc, a band aid if used before proper correction, not a cure.

Always treat the room the best you can to see if you can get by without correction and only use it if no other way to get the results you want.

based on your measurements there is very little really wrong here,

the more pertinent question is what are you trying to accomplish?

just because you don't have a perfectly ruler flat curve doesn't mean your system isn't perfect as it is. 

for most people a perfectly flat response is not desirable a bit of coloration can be a good thing as it creates a " more Musical sounding experience. 

So the real question is what are you unhappy with? and why do you think a flatter response curve is necessarily  better?

As as per acoustical treatment vs dsp acoustic treatments are always best as a  dsp is always going to be in the signal path. 

In our reference sound room and theater  we strive for acoustical tuning first and then dsp as a final tune 

Hope this helps

Dave and Troy

audio Intellect NJ

@audiotroy Of course, a very fair question.  

This all started when my original keeper speakers (Aerial Acoustics Model 7B) were really overwhelming the room with bass.  This room is new to me as we renovated our home and we just moved in a few months ago.  Previously, I had the Aerials in a larger space and the bass was fine.  The overwhelming bass led me to sell them and go for more modestly sized speakers.

The Sonus Faber Concerto Domus initially sounded better, bass more controlled.  But when I compared them to my friend's Electa Amator II's at his place, it was no contest.  His had much much wider soundstage and it just sounded much prettier, even though the bass didn't go as low.  But this was at his place.  

I came back to my place and the Concerto Domus sounded better than at his place, but not great.  I also own the Monitor Audio Gold Reference 20's and compared those to the Domus.  The Monitors had a much better (wider) soundstage, similar bass, and better clarity, so I concluded between the two, I preferred the Monitors.

My friend then brought his Electa Amators over to my place to do a direct comparison against my Monitors. The soundstage was comparable (good), but his Amators just had a more warm/full/lush midrange, esp for female vocals.  Yet on some songs (Sultans of Swing), the Amators strangely sounded grating and no warmth.  

Now, granted, we didn't do a great job of setting them in the ideal position - we had them to the right of each Monitor speaker so the distance was comparable between the two, but the Amators were offset to the right of the room.  So they were much closer to the right wall and further from the left wall.  The speakers could have been interfering with each other too.

In general, when comparing the two rooms, the Amators just sounded much warmer, fuller, less high end extension at his place.  So it was kind of night and day different how they sounded at the two places.  While in both places the soundstage was nice and wide, the tonal characteristics were quite different.

His place is much larger, wider open, I would probably say softer (more furniture, less hard surfaces) and while the highs seem a bit dampened, everything sounds "pretty good" to excellent there.  Nothing sounds outright bad.  Whereas at my place, that one song in particular sounded downright bad.

So the working theory was that maybe my room, being much smaller, wasn't right in some way acoustically.  Maybe it needed extensive room treatments, or digital room correction, or something to make it a better room for serious listening.

So rather than my chase other pairs of speakers hoping I'd get that right combination of good bass, warm/full/lush midrange, extended highs, and wide/large soundstage, it just seemed to make sense to take a step back and assess the room first.  So I bought the miniDSP UMIK-1 and ran the REW software, and then got the FR curves I've shared.

It seemed like there were a decent number of peaks and troughs enough that the response wasn't very linear and some treatment (whether via room treatments or digital correction) might be necessary.

But posting here and on other forums, I'm hearing that it may not be all that bad and might be good enough with some tweaking in placement of listening position and speaker placement to get by without doing extensive room modifications.

So that's the history and how I got here. . .

Thoughts?

Just wanted to update the thread about the results of playing with the listening position based on suggestions from forum members (on another forum).

The suggestion was to follow the rule of odds in speaker and LP placement.  This resulted in putting my speakers with front baffles 37" from the front wall (1/5), 28" from side walls (1/5), which placed them roughly 80" apart.

The original suggestion was to have my listening position (LP) 5'/60" from the rear wall.  I took a FR measurement there.  But this LP moved me pretty far forward from my Atmos centered LP, so I took some additional measurements moving further back toward the back of the room in ~6" increments.

If we zero in on the 55-60Hz dip as a reference point:

The blue (lowest trough) is the 60" off back wall LP
Next higher green line is 52"
Next two higher lines (purple and bolded yellow) are ~46" (I tried to replicate this with a second measurement later, was probably an inch or two off from original position, but it's close)
Highest brown/gold line is the near-original 40" off back wall LP (I think I originally started at 38")

My observation is that the LP doesn't much affect the 35Hz or 95-100Hz peaks - they're pretty much there and similar in magnitude regardless of LP within this range.

The 55-60Hz dip though is pretty heavily influenced by LP with it filling it more the further back the LP moves toward the back wall, but this comes at the expense of creating a new dip at ~180-190Hz, which isn't as deep as the 55-60Hz one, but it's definitely a trade-off.

Based purely on this comparative FR curve, I think I like the bolded 46" off the back wall response the best. It fills in the 55-60Hz dip to within -3dB and keeps the 180-190Hz dip it creates to within -3dB as well.

So if I stick with this, I just live with the -3dB dips and experiment to see if there's anything in the way of reasonably priced room treatments to reduce the 35Hz and 95-100Hz peaks.

Does this seem like the best compromise and an overall "good enough" room environment to not have to spend money on expensive room treatments or digital room correction?