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.
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. |
Update to the thread. Here are 3 FR curves for my new-to-me Fritz LS7 Illuminator bookshelf speakers:
The difference in the curves are 3 different listening positions: Red: 60" from back wall Purple: 48" from back wall Blue: 36" from back wall The 35Hz peak isn't nearly as high as with the previous speakers (Monitor Audio Gold Reference 20) perhaps because the LS7's put out less quantities of bass vs the floor standing Monitors, but that 40-80Hz null is very much there and even in the "best" case at 36", it's down about 10dB from reference level. There's another dip around 100-250Hz or so. As mentioned earlier, I'm very open to getting two audio-focused subs like the SVS SB-1000 Pro to fill in the nulls in the bass region if that will even out the bass response. About the super chunk bass traps for the back wall - I measured and actually only have 12" between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling - not sure if a scaled down version of that makes sense there or is necessary with the new FR curves. I have about the same amount of room where the back wall meet the side walls, again constrained by the back cabinets. Right now, I'm using big 26" high speakers as speaker stands, but will be getting 24" high real speaker stands tomorrow. I haven't tried to play with speaker location, they're still located 38" from the front wall and 28" from the side walls (at the 1/5 room width and depth location). Played with toe-in just a bit, but not a huge impact from what I could tell. The ETC impulse peaks smoothed to 0.2ms show just one peak between 3-4ms around -14db or so, but all other peaks below -17dB. Any thoughts are welcome as always. As far as subjective listening impressions: They sound more forward in the upper mids/highs than the Monitors. At high volume, I want to tame them some. This is with grills off. With grills on, it seems to incrementally calm those forward frequencies some, but visually, I like the look without the grills much more, so will try to make adjustments as possible with grills off.
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@captouch I guess physics does hold. Good that you've found out for yourself that as close to the front wall as possible is a better null reducer.
Also yes if you can DIY some corner wedges that are from corner floor to ceiling or even midpoint with this Rockwool - https://lumberbarn.com/products/rockwool-comfortbatt%C2%AE-stone-wool-insulation as the filling material.
But he's the two subwoofers are very important and you need to do the subwoofer crawl with mains when you get them |
@kofibaffour So if the corner wedges are 12" x 12" x 17" (hypotenuse) and as long as needed to stretch from cabinet top to ceiling or on top of a cabinet between the ceiling and back wall - this size will still be beneficial? FYI, it's actually further back into the room that reduces the major null. This 50-80Hz null is pretty much there with every speaker, but various in magnitude based on listening position. So it must be a room thing, as with the 35Hz peak. |
