Digital Room Correction vs Room Treatments

Yes build the traps as shown across the entire back wall. The colourful panels in the photos are DIY broad-band absorbers. Google has dozens of how to DIY examples. You need a few. And consider heavy drapes across that window.

See dimensions for bass trap construction from a previous post of mine, it's all there so no need for me to repeat. Once again google for DIY superchunk bass traps but do not go smaller than the sizes I provided. You will measure and hear the benefit and it's not small.

First off, if you want to be able to place the subs where you won’t fall over them then forget REL or any other sub that does not provide adjustable phase. REL subs only provide 0 or 180 degrees.

Let’s now look at that huge 35Hz peak caused by bass waves combining ’in phase’. Think of waves traveling towards the beach and remember how when secondary or tertiary waves catch up with those in front you get a larger wave form. That illustrates waves combining in phase, OK?  So the exact same thing is happening in your room and it’s happening at 35Hz.

What if you could magically provide an antiphase 35Hz signal? problem solved, right? Well you can do exactly that by adjusting phase, SPL, crossover frequency, crossover slope, room gain and PEQ.  You can tame the peaks and fill in the nulls. Sub number 2 will smooth things more.

Your speakers have ports so as an experiment plug them and see what happens to the response on REW and report back. There will be noticeable change,visually and audibly.

Before you spend on Dirac Live get yourself 2 x SVS SB 1000 PRO subs for about $600 each. Buy, beg or borrow. Adding subs does a lot more than just smooth the response, there is a performance gain across the spectrum.

As mentioned it’s not only SVS that can do this, many others available but the ones I suggest are IMO best value. Small compact units that also provide the remote App to allow adjustment from you armchair.

I have a 5m x 7m room opening to the kitchen and my small REL @#$$% and SVS fill my room with effortless detailed bass. The only reason I don’t have a 3rd sub is because we are going to sell the house.

I mentioned reading papers from Geddes, Toole and Welti. I strongly encourage you to google them up and read and learn from them.

BTW - if you are a ROON or JRiver user then Mitch's Convolution Filters are easy to use.

Honestly too hard and too much.  Simple parametric EQs  in Roon will solve the OP's problems.

Here is a plot of my room:

As you can see it looks a little bit better than yours. No 35Hz peak. The aberration between 100Hz and 250Hz is because I am not able to vary phase on the REL. The point being you will be able to get an even better in room response than mine by following my advice.

The above complies with the industry standard of +/_3dB up to the Schroeder frequency, the modal region.

Contrary to the advice above PEQ in Roon can not solve the overlong in-room decay, you need absorbers for that and PEQ does not absorb. How can it possibly know what frequencies need absorption and by how much. REW is the tool to help with that.

Those SVS subs are pretty cool - compact, sealed, and not too expensive.

I can take some measurements with ports plugged on my current speakers, but I really want to see how the curves look with my incoming bookshelf speakers before deciding how big my issues are on a baseline level as well as how much they it can be improved by tweaking LP and speaker location.

Meanwhile, I’ll do some homework to figure out how to build those superchunk traps.

OP

Something that I would look at is your room’s reverb time and if it’s excessive, fix that first.  I have had good luck with GIK’s Polyfusor’s which defuse and reduce reverb time with a little bit of absorption.  They also look better than the rectangular absorption products IMHO.

My experience with bass traps is they are better at fixing peaks in the 60-100 Hz range.  They have to be quite substantial or use acoustic wizardly (Tube Traps) to get down to your room’s 35 Hz main resonance peak.  I would address that peak with EQ.  To avoid a digital conversion, you might consider an analog parametric EQ.  You will notice the most improvement in movie playback by reducing this peak - bass will have impact instead of going "whump."

My current configuration includes bookshelf speakers (KEF R3 Meta, Dynaudio Contour 20) and Rhythmic SE12 subwoofers.  The SE12’s include a band of analog parametric EQ.  They are servo subwoofers so they work great with music.  I am all digital these days, so I am rocking a MiniDSP SHD Studio.  Applying DIRAC correction really focuses the image in my room.  I would consider that icing on the cake after fixing reverb and bass.