Subwoofers with room correction built in?


Who has experience, good or bad or whatever, with the built-in room correction/DSP/EQ that newer subwoofers (except REL) come with these days?  I’m excited to try the system built into an ELAC sub 3070 that’s coming my way soon, but I want to be realistic.
Thanks.
redwoodaudio

Showing 1 response by mijostyn

redwood, room control is really speaker control. You are adjusting the speaker to suit room acoustics AT THE LISTENING POSITION. Everywhere else in the room the correction will be wrong. You still have to do your best to improve room acoustics. The Room control in subwoofers is extremely basic. It can only adjust frequency and phase. It can not correct group delays and most subwoofers have low pass filters only and not two way crossovers. These are two serious flaws if you are looking for the ultimate bass. Having said this a sub with room control is better than without and using two of them will be an improvement in most systems
The absolute best way of going about this is to get a DSP preamp like the MiniDSP , Anthem STR or DEQX Premate. Then build a passive sub from a kit. PartsExpress has a lot of them. Then get a commercial sound reinforcement amp with a high damping factor >500 and a lot of watts.
I like QSC products over Crown. With a system like this you have digital control over everything including the crossover. If electronics are so susceptible to vibration why would you want to put them inside a subwoofer?