Room correction, DSP for dummies.

Remarkable statements for a remarkable product 🙂 All I can say is listen to a 2170 or a 3400 properly set up and you will get it. Simple stuff here IMHO. Plenty of rigs don’t sound that good, or as good as the designers intended because of poor speaker placement and room issues. Think of it like this. A talented chef prepares a wonderful tasting ingredient....perhaps a sauce. It tastes wonderful when used in well executed recipes, but even this spectacular tasting ingredient can be part of an awefull tasting dish when the total recipe just doesn’t work. The ingredient, while awesome, in the end did not produce its intended result....a great tasting dish. We listen to systems, not just speakers or amplifiers. The room is an ingredient. How speakers are placed is also an ingredient. Our gear ingredients. Many other ingredients. SOTA room correction helps assure several of the ingredients work well together so you are more likely to to have a successful total recipe.....a great sounding system. Room correction is your personal chef. Oh my, this last line is now coming back at me in the form of a question 🙂

Speaker builders have no doubt heard their creations in systems that did not sound as they intended. I am sure they have been mortified with the resulting sound...not as they intended. Builders intend their speakers to sound good in your home, not harsh, not dull, not poor.  That is what intend means.  Surely no designer intends a speaker to sound poor in your home? 

Ok, my brain is now tired as I tried to extract too much out of what in the end is a simple truth. I am most likely not smart enough to understand the deeper meaning of the questions. Most likely the case here. The OPs post is about DSP for dummies! I will go back to developing bacon flavors now...my real expertise!

OP: My recommendation is to buy a calibrated microphone, a miniDSP mic goes for $100 on Amazon, and down load the free Room Eq Wizard (REW) software and measure your own room. Based on that data, you could have a more meaningful discussion about what DSP can do to improve your room/ speaker acoustics.

I’ve done the measurements and it’s a lot of fun.  You can get a miniDSP equalizer for $200 and program it with the same tools you used to measure the room.  It works as advertised. My room/ speaker set up has some SBIR issues but DSP cannot fix a null.  In the end, I didn’t use DSP.  I did some room treatment (a more general solution) and was satisfied.

SPEAKERS AS THEY ARE DESIGNED! 

I know people who design things for a living. I have not talked to many who said they were not often forced to make tradeoffs between what they desire vs what is possible given their reality. 

I am also 100% positive that while some favored systems are really very good, there are many ways to end up at a destination. One that is right for some may not be right for another no matter how much a person may want everyone to follow their lead. 

I use the MathAudioRoomEQ plugin for my music player, Foobar2000.

The good: it's free.  It works way better than not using it.

The bad: I don't know; haven't tried any of other solutions.

REW plus minidsp looks interesting, since I could use a turntable, and it would work on ALL my computer audio, not just Foobar2000.

Winter is when I typically play with audio - summer is for cycling and cameras.  Maybe this year.

I use a DSPeaker Antimode 8033 on each sub and I love the results enough to consider getting their Antimode 2.0 for full range correction.