What are your opinions of DSP's for speakers


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? 

willywonka

Showing 1 response by soix

I’m a bit mixed on this.  As a purist I don’t want any extra processing going on in my system and would prefer using room treatments to mitigate those issues.  But many years ago I got to hear a six-figure system in a dedicated and treated room using the TacT 2.0 preamp utilizing their room correction (now employed in Lyngdorf products) and the results were fairly astonishing.  The system sounded very good in bypass mode without room correction, but it was undeniable with correction the sound was significantly better across the board.  I heard something very similar at a TacT demo at a show several months later so this wasn’t just a one-off impression.  Kal Rubinson did a review of the same unit in Stereophile around the same time, and what he found in his treated room was pretty spot on with what I heard and summarized it well in the review when he said “And even though I have concerns about the absolute transparency of the TacT’s A/D performance, those were more than outweighed by the advantages of room correction.”  Those echo my experiences exactly, and here’s the review where his listening impressions  start on page 3 if you wanna skip all the setup hoopla.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/tact-audio-rcs-20-digital-equalizerpreamplifier-page-3

So initially as a purist I was very resistant to using any DSP in my 2-channel system, but knowing what it can potentially do I will definitely give it a shot at some point just to see because if/when it works it really works to the point where you don’t wanna listen without it.  So I’d say don’t knock it til you at least try it.  Just my experience FWIW.