Digital Room Correction vs Room Treatments

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.

I'd never use dsp on an all analog system, except for subs which is practically a necessity. My experience is all the dsp software I've tried has negatively altered the presentation such that it sounds less 'natural'. Roon dsp atrocious, HQPlayer much better, still, prefer room treatments in my dedicated room.

Yes, I'm kind of leaning against considering that the room seems "good enough" now that I've tweaked listening and speaker position.  

To do a MiniDSP w/DIRAC Live experiment would be $500 minimum and to do a more sophisticated custom filter would require inserting a computer into my setup to run the more sophisticated DSP - that's $1000 minimum.  Either of which would add an ADC/DAC step.

@captouch Mitch creates a DSP package called a Convolution Filter. He uses some very expensive audio software to do this ($20k). This software is way more powerful than any physical audio gear that is inserted in a processor loop.

As I mentioned before the Convolution Filter is a digital only solution. That is your CD player, and tuners are out of luck. It only works with a DAC.

You install the Convolution filter on a music server, which is a computer. In my case, I use ROON Core on a cheap computer and install the filters on that ROON Core server. ROON has a GUI to install the filters. The filter is in the signal path (not sure if that is bad) and applies the filter BEFORE the bits are sent to the DAC. Your streamer sends the modded bits to your DAC. The DAC is connected to your preamp.

In my opinion the best way to do DSP (but only digital sources)

BTW - what I describe in NOT ROON DSP. The same filter can work on JRiver which is completely different from ROON.

@yyzsantabarbara Thanks for the explanation.  I wrote to Mitch and we exchanged a couple of emails.

He referred me to a device that could be inserted into a processor loop and interface with a computer to make it work on all sources, though it was an open question on whether the device would play well with my particular process loop (impedance matching and all).

It would be an over $1100 solution for everything which could be worth it if there were no other ways to address my issues.  
 

But I do think my room is shaping up to be okay after all.  And Mitch said if I changed my speakers (which is always possible), the filters would need to be redone, so I need to be sure I’m both settled on my endgame speakers and have remaining issues that keep me from being happy with the sound without DSP.

It’ll take me some time to sort all that out.