If you have a nice system why do you really need room treatments?

Here are some easy tricks to try with Roon DSP parametric EQ that I think are useful in many cases, especially for cases of older ears and listening at lower volumes.

1) roll off bass levels below the frequency that your speakers tend to normally roll off in your room. Your amp will thank you by lowering its load and allowing it to do a better job with the frequency your speakers actually cover well.

2) If you measure and detect bass modes, Provide a bump in the right direction to help level that out. This is not a substitute for room treatments to address bass issues but can help if targeted properly.

3) try a 3db (or more or less maybe) boost from 4-6khz centered at 5 khz. This adds a bit of edge to the sound that older ears in particular may appreciate, especially at lower volumes. Think making your lower efficiency speakers sound more like a quality pair of high efficiency horns. You will probably not have to turn the volume up as much as well for things to sound sharp and clear.

4) For older ears in particular, consider a treble boost starting at around 10khz or higher, depending on the particular ears used. A hearing test can help establish how well high frequencies are heard, but it is pretty much always the case that as our ears age our ability to hear up to 20khz as one may have done easily when young is no longer a reality.

5) If you are not listening on-axis, consider measuring the distance to each speaker from listening position (in centimeters) and set up Roon DSP speaker correction accordingly for a more coherent sound at your off-axis listening position. You might also decide to add a db boost or decrease to left or right speaker. This is DSPs way of providing a balance control like the analog kind that pretty much all hifi gear used to have.

6) If you are listening well off axis from tweeter direction, additional treble boost at higher frequencies may be desirable.

Roon DSP makes it very easy to apply each of these in separate filters that all work together and then tweak each as needed to fine tune the results. Make sure the DSP does not introduce clipping as indicated in Roon as the music plays. It’s a good idea to use headroom management in Roon DSP to protect against that. I find I tend to like having headroom mgmt active in most cases anyway, but that may be a personal preference thing. If Roon indicates clipping (red indicator) during playback with DSP enabled, individual filter overall volume levels can be lowered as well to avoid.

@emergingsoul

Thank you for the kind words.

TO measure rooms, take a look at Room EQ Wizard freeware you can run on a laptop. It’s fairly techy but worth the time to get a handle on. THere is lots of info on how to use it on teh internet. I’ve used it to measure then auto-create convolution filter files that can then be used in Roon DSP for room correction. There is a cookbook for how to do that out there on teh internet. ITs covered in Roon forums if you do a search there.

1) the room largely determines how any system at any price will actually sound

2) those with a goal to get the best sound possible will care and others less so

3) some rooms may require little or no tweaks for acoustics and others may be a total disaster. I have measured and tweaked acoustics in 5 different rooms in my house and they cover the range from little or no tweaking needed to well short of a total disaster but some serious issues to address to make things sound their best.

4) trained ears may suffice in some cases but to get it right for sure it helps to measure what you have first before taking action

5) Everything in the room affects acoustics to some degree. Room modes in the bass region are the toughest issues to address completely but some combo of traps and DSP can be applied to make things better. Other specialized room acoustic solutions like panels, etc. might be used to address any issues that cannot be solved in a particular room otherwise. Start with primary reflection points on walls, floor and ceiling based on speaker and primary listening location, Dispersion pattern measurements for a particular speaker model can help determine how to best apply, if needed.

6) DSP including room correction features in your system are your best friend when it comes to tweaking any system as needed to correct for issues associated with room acoustics!!!!

7) These days vendors integrate DSP into hardware (example:miniDSP, Anthem, NAD, Arcam, others) and software (example: Roon).

8) Once that is done (addressing room acoustics) you might then take the next step and tweak the sound from there to personal preference. Or just forget about room acoustics and the complexities of addressing those properly and just DSP to personal preference away as needed, for example using graphic or parametric EQ capabilities in DSP like that available in Roon. Either way (done right) should land you in a better place regardless of how good or expensive your gear is otherwise.