What are your opinions of DSP's for speakers

DSP packages in speakers are typically for implementing active crossovers, obtaining a performance benchmark, etc, not for "room/bass correction". 

The best sounding Klipsch speaker, for example, is the flagship Jubilee model which comes with DSP/active crossover. The "essence of music" didn’t get lost on the Klipsch Jubilee and it sounded very good. But, the "essence of music" got lost a lot to my ears on the lower model purist Klipsch heritage speakers. Purism lost the essence of music on that one, for sure.

Room Correction, etc, you don’t need to worry about it. Your 2 channel purist electronics won’t have any of it, with a couple of exceptions perhaps. Yamaha, for example, introduced some room correction with reflective sound control filters, etc on one of their 2 channel integrated amps, R-N2000A, which is tech borrowed from their multichannel gear. You could toggle it on/off and determine which sounded better, i.e. decide if the "essence of music" got better with it turned on or off

On the same note, any purist DAC which says FPGA is very much in the DSP realm. The guy who bought some 80k apparently "purist" dac which sounded like his soul finally came alive actually ended up buying a DSP dac. It was the DSP that brought his soul back from the dead in such instances, it appears.

This seems to be a popular trend with many speaker brands. Some have internal amplification with DSP’s and some have external implementations of it like Legacy. I have heard some good results with it being used but don’t necessarily like the idea of everything being digitized for the sake of room/bass correction. Do you own or plan on buying a speaker like this, or have you heard any using it? 

It would seem that your failure to execute would be yours alone, not a universal fact.

Took 10 years to get it right, but, I have a DSP multichannel rig that will beat the daylights out of any of these 2 ch rigs on audiogon (including mine)...... pretty sure I know what you all have going there for those 2 apparently pure non-dsp channels, what the limitations are...

Have yet to hear DSP work well for 2ch. It usually make the soundstage smaller, and makes everything sound compressed. I’m sure it’s smoother, cleaner, optimized, but it takes all the emotion out of it, feeling sterile. 

Yes, DSP for my 9.4.2, (13 speakers @ 150wpc) absolutely! It’s almost impossible to time align all them speakers to a listening spot. Soundstage isn’t affected with 4 speakers providing it. But music (unless encoded for atmos) sounds lifeless, and dull, but movies are incredible. 

@mswale

Vintage analog gear? or vintage albums? DSP & ADC conversion of some vintage album that can be tied to master tape is perhaps not the greatest idea.

But, for any new artist or newer album for a older artist, the final product/master from the studio is usually a 24 bit hires digital master (1980s onwards). I just don’t see the point of putting that on some analog medium for medium loyalty purposes.

The official hires master can be purchased for 10 bucks or so these days from qobuz, if you have a qobuz sublime subscription. But, i would spend 60 to 200 bucks a pop, botch it and throw it on vinyl due to medium loyalty? doesn’t make any sense, not to mention the price disparity.

On the same note, even some of the best sounding vinyl (Mofi’s stuff, for example) of vintage 60s 70s albums went through ADC before it got to you anymore. 

Anyways, I run it through a DAC...If i want the sound of master tape, Mark Levinson’s master class software gets you that sound with any hires, red book cd quality or even some mp3. There are so many albums where you can’t find tape even if you had a reel to reel deck. Mark Levinson’s stuff takes care of that.

These are things that didn’t exist 20 years ago, i.e. you couldn’t easily just get your hands on a official hires studio master or there was no master class software from Levinson or whatever...times have changed.

Never stated any facts, just my opinion. My 2ch is all vintage analog.