Rives PARC or Tact 2.0 AA for room correction?

I too am looking into this approach. I must say - on paper - the TACT seems superior to the Rives due to the time correction it offers, which should make speaker placement and other room issue less disruptive of imaging.

Rebuttals to the above are welcome, for I am in a similar boat as "acw" -- there are no local dealers for these devices.

Best,

Mr. Rives,

I appreciate your detailed reply and found it quite topical to my concerns.

I can also appreciate the introduction of digital artifacts (you mentioned ringing) with FFT filters (I've studied/designed such devices under Dr. Paul Horowitz). Still, one must weight the impact of such distortions against the larger issue of the room's corruption of the time component of the signal; for me, it is not hard to imagine such artifacts ultimatelly falling into the noise, particularly if the system is highly adjustable (as the TACT is).

At the end of the day, however, I suppose I'm still stuck with the inevitable home audition (you see, I am quite lazy :-). I only wish audio dealers were more receptive towards carrying such products, so I could give the different approaches the acid test: listening to them.

Again, thanks for your reply.

Best,

Onhwy, I don't understand your suggestion that the TACT is inappropriate for this application and assertion that analog equalization is the optimal solution. The reason to add an "extra A/D and D/A" stage in the playback is to remove room effects which have a great negative impact than any intermediate processing steps.

Candidly, the 'digital artifact' argument (not made by you) is a bit specious, for analog equalization also introduces phase and amplitude artifacts to the playback. So it's more an issue of minimizing the negative effects of the improvement activity. And on this score, we fall into the subjective realm of what people are looking for in their system. If time coherency is paramount to the listener, then there is one product which can assist. If frequency flatness is desired, however, then there are two approaches (which have pros and cons).