I make my own loudspeakers, so I have 2 calibrated microphones. The issue with convolution are several.
I mean, by all means, go ahead and try it. The issues are in my mind that you cannot fix room acoustic issues such as reflection points from speaker output alone, measuring how we perceive sound in a non-anechoic field is hard, and lastly, most of us are just not that sensitive to the phase issues these systems purport to fix. All of these points are made better by Floyd Toole than me, but I’m in agreement. What I haven’t seen him do is complain about the CPU needed to execute them.
One critical point Toole makes, which convolution filters cannot solve, is that how we perceive sound is not how a microphone does. Dirac is one type of product that has some interesting techniques to address this, so if you are going with the hammer approach to using DSP, I’d suggest looking into DiracLive instead.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against EQ, I’m against expecting too much from them. Convolution filters are cute, and naive. In a heavily treated room with 1 listening location I am sure they’ll work fine. Dirac seems to have a much more sophisticated approach to how they calculate their filters and attempts to deal with the criticism Toole makes. Personally, I’m on the team of using room treatment plus a few carefully chosen filters to fix what I must, and I am extremely happy that way.
And lets not forget speaker dispersion. Hsu and Klipsch make some small 2-ways with horn loaded tweeters which are probably going to sound a lot better in cramped spaces.
I mean, by all means, go ahead and try it. The issues are in my mind that you cannot fix room acoustic issues such as reflection points from speaker output alone, measuring how we perceive sound in a non-anechoic field is hard, and lastly, most of us are just not that sensitive to the phase issues these systems purport to fix. All of these points are made better by Floyd Toole than me, but I’m in agreement. What I haven’t seen him do is complain about the CPU needed to execute them.
One critical point Toole makes, which convolution filters cannot solve, is that how we perceive sound is not how a microphone does. Dirac is one type of product that has some interesting techniques to address this, so if you are going with the hammer approach to using DSP, I’d suggest looking into DiracLive instead.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against EQ, I’m against expecting too much from them. Convolution filters are cute, and naive. In a heavily treated room with 1 listening location I am sure they’ll work fine. Dirac seems to have a much more sophisticated approach to how they calculate their filters and attempts to deal with the criticism Toole makes. Personally, I’m on the team of using room treatment plus a few carefully chosen filters to fix what I must, and I am extremely happy that way.
And lets not forget speaker dispersion. Hsu and Klipsch make some small 2-ways with horn loaded tweeters which are probably going to sound a lot better in cramped spaces.