Digital Room Correction vs Room Treatments


I finally got a mic and used REW to analyze my room.  Attached is the freq response for 3 different speakers (Monitor Audio Gold Reference 20, Sonus Faber Electa Amator II, and Sonus Faber Concerto Domus).

They all show similar characteristics - at least the most prominent ones.  I did play around with the Amators trying them closer together and more forward in the room, but the major characteristics you see were mostly unchanged.

With this magnitude and number of deviations from a more ideal frequency response curve, am I better off biting the bullet and just doing digital room correction, or can these issues be addressed with room treatments without going crazy and having the room look like Frankenstein’s lab.

Cost is a consideration, but doing it right/better is the most important factor.

If digital room correction is a viable way to address this, what are the best solutions today?  My system is largely analog (80’s/90’s Mcintosh preamp/amp, tube phono stage), and streaming isn’t a priority (though I’m not against it).

 If the better digital correction solutions come in the form of a streaming HW solution, that’s fine, I’d do that.  

Just looking for guidance on the best way to deal with the room, as both serious room treatments and digital EQ room correction are both areas I haven’t delved into before.


Thanks all.  If more info is needed, let me know.  My room is 11.5’ wide and 15.5’ long with the speakers on the short wall.  Backs of speakers are 3-3.5’ off the front wall and they’re at least 2ft from either side wall.  Some placement flexibility is there, but not a huge amount.

captouch

@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?

I personally have found that digital room correction does a lot more than room treatments, but I listen to digital sources primarily and the OP is mainly analog.  

IMHO treat the room before you treat the music. 

you are mostly analog so you have to go a to d dsp then d to a  I can say that on my system my mini dsp HD adds noise  

I have a heavily treated room and have played with dsp below 90hz. It won’t address a dip.  Some tracks sound better others don’t. 
 

good on you with the Aerials. I have 8b which are on the secondary system, main are IRS Beta. 

Bass was a constant issue/problem for me when I had larger (mostly full-range) bass reflex speakers. Switching to still large but somewhat lower range limited (down to 40 Hz) acoustic suspension speakers with dual large’ish subs gave me tremendous flexibility to tame bass response issues and resulted in much better sound across the board.

For you folks implementing active correction, once you do the evaluation, how is the active correction implemented physically? Do you need to run the signal through a DSP device? Doesn’t that add noise?  I do not see too much about active correction in these forums but maybe I haven’t been looking.