Room Acoustics

Most "mild" room treatments utilizing thin layers of foam and / or "stuffed" cloth materials, etc... are actually very non-linear in their absorption of frequencies. I commented on this many, many years ago in the Agon archives and posted links to actual absorption curves for commonly used devices. I did this after someone inquired about purchasing some of these devices and told them that they would actually be creating more of a problem. In plain English, most of those types of devices are a big mess.

If you want to treat a room and end up with results that are actually better / more linear than what you started with, rather than just shifting problem areas to different frequency regions, you have to treat the room as a whole. Once again, i recommend that folks pick up and read some books by F. Alton Everest BEFORE spending money on products that you can do a better job of buildng yourself and impliment them in a manner that is more suitable to obtaining optimum results. Not all rooms are the same, nor do they require the same type and quantity of treatments. If they did, they could design speakers that worked within those constraints and did so perfectly. Sean
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Mprime: As it is right now and if properly done, treating the room acoustically provides far more benefits than doing so electronically. This is not to say that electronic correction doesn't sound good, but that i don't think it sounds "as good" overall.

As a side note, AudioXpress has been running a multi-part article about electronic room correction and the results that one can achieve. In the article, the author stated that in-room response was drastically improved using DSP, but that dynamics were compromised. I don't know if this has to do with the "slower" circuitry in some of this gear trying to compensate for on the fly corrections as needed or if it has to do with shifts in the tonal balance. As we all know, getting rid of large bass peaks can drastically effect the apparent "power" of what we hear.

My guess is that DSP will get MUCH better over time. Due to the use of more refined circuitry and the use of "audiophile grade" parts sometime in the future, i think this holds a lot of potential. There are already companies offering various formats and products for this type of device with some of them being quite sophisticated in operation. There is one in specific that i'm thinking of but can't recall the name. It is quite expensive but supposedly works VERY well.

What i've done in the past is to take a DSP unit, install it into a system and take readings of it as is. After analyzing the results and making a few changes to the system and room, we've run another series of tests. This results in a few more changes to the system and room. After doing this several times, you get to the point where the system / room is consderably more neutral in response and doesn't need all that much correction. You've now reached the point that the system and room sounds as good as possible without going "gonzo". Once we've reached a level of performance that the owner is happy with ( or we are just too tired to carry on further ), we pull the DSP out of the system and relax.

By using this approach, you can obtain truly excellent results without introducing yet another component and two sets of cables into the reproductive chain. Having said that, this type of "adventure" can be VERY time consuming and "interesting" to say the least. That's because some "changes" that "fix" one problem create a new one. On top of that, some physical changes that might be necessary to achieve optimum performance may not be possible in a given installation, so you end up compromising in both cases.

In that respect, DSP may achieve "better" or "more neutral" results than "physical correction". Depending on the quality of the DSP device being used and the level of reproduction achieved without it, sonic results can vary pretty drastically though. This is not to mention that going this route can introduce further cost and complexity to a system.

In a side by side comparison ( acoustics vs DSP ), I would bet that DSP has a MUCH higher "WAF" : ) Sean
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