I'm not an audiophile in the obsessive-compulsive sense, but I've been recording music in my home studio for 20 years and I know my way around it. This sort of calibration is not ideal. Not only are you measuring with a device that has an imperfect response curve, but you are also measuring the room at a single monophonic point in space. The way that sound interacts with the room and your ears is far more complex than that. Ultimately, this is a bandaid for a poorly treated room. If you're serious about getting a flat response curve from your monitoring room, you're far better off learning how to treat the room properly and how to position your monitors within the room for the best results.
Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
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Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#22I'm not an audiophile in the obsessive-compulsive sense, but I've been recording music in my home studio for 20 years and I know my way around it. This sort of calibration is not ideal. Not only are you measuring with a device that has an imperfect response curve, but you are also measuring the room at a single monophonic point in space. The way that sound interacts with the room and your ears is far more complex tha…
You'd also be relying very heavily on the microphone used to measure it.
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#23This looks cool. I'm not sure if they are intending to go all the way to room correction but it can really do wonders. A good while back my music setup used filters calculated by an open source FIR tool with playback driven by an older version of Shairport (emulating an AirPort express) using BruteFIR as a convolver. Fiddly to set up but it sounded really good.
1. http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#24There is an older project with better math inside: http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/
For starters, it doesn't try to achieve a phase-neutral response, because a phase-neutral response created in a room is only valid in one point of the room, and creates pre-echo artifacts elsewhere. In fact, it tries to separate the response of the speaker itself from the response of the room, by setting a threshold in the time domain, so that everything coming before it must be unaffected by the room. Then, everything coming before the threshold is corrected to a linear phase, while everything else is corrected to the minimum phase (thus making the second part of the filter purely causal).
Also, they provide an argument, citing literature, that equalizing to a flat frequency response would be wrong in a room, and thus provide an option to remove excessive treble and achieve a 1dB/octave roll-off.
Please see the details at http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/doc/drc.html
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#25No post body was provided.
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#26I'm not an audiophile in the obsessive-compulsive sense, but I've been recording music in my home studio for 20 years and I know my way around it. This sort of calibration is not ideal. Not only are you measuring with a device that has an imperfect response curve, but you are also measuring the room at a single monophonic point in space. The way that sound interacts with the room and your ears is far more complex tha…
You'd also be relying very heavily on the microphone used to measure it.
That's the 'device with an imperfect response curve', I assume.
In fairness, the readme does state:
> A good microphone is needed, with a wide frequency range and preferably with a flat frequency response.
By 'preferably' I assume it's implied that it can curve-fit (whatever's needed, I know next to nothing about this) to a non-flat microphone response, as long as it's known, but if it's flat then no need.
If it's unknown (and non-flat or assumed non-flat because it's cheap and doesn't make any claims about it) then that's the real problem, no point trying to do anything because it's like trying to construct a level floor with a shoelace for a spirit level.
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#27Newbie question: how do we know we can trust the microphone? It sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem to equalize speakers with an equalized microphone, but maybe microphones are simpler and can be assumed to be equalized ?
There are cheap calibrated mics available. There's one for about $20 from Dayton Audio.
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#28I'm a psychoacoustician and this is not the way, very sorry to report. Others have touched on the acoustic issues already, so let me touch on the psychological ones: your perception of sound from loudspeakers doesn't just depend on the acoustic waves hitting your ears. It also depends on your personality and expectations. If you genuinely believe that doing a seance to drive out the poltergeist from your speaker set up will make the sound better, it will be difficult to convince you otherwise precisely because the acoustics did not actually perceptibly change.
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#29I'm a psychoacoustician and this is not the way, very sorry to report. Others have touched on the acoustic issues already, so let me touch on the psychological ones: your perception of sound from loudspeakers doesn't just depend on the acoustic waves hitting your ears. It also depends on your personality and expectations. If you genuinely believe that doing a seance to drive out the poltergeist from your speaker set…
> If you genuinely believe that doing a seance to drive out the poltergeist from your speaker set up will make the sound better, it will be difficult to convince you otherwise
I think you just found the next big thing in audiophile fads
Re: Show HN: HiFiScan, a Python app to optimize your loudspeakers
#30I'm a psychoacoustician and this is not the way, very sorry to report. Others have touched on the acoustic issues already, so let me touch on the psychological ones: your perception of sound from loudspeakers doesn't just depend on the acoustic waves hitting your ears. It also depends on your personality and expectations. If you genuinely believe that doing a seance to drive out the poltergeist from your speaker set…
Nonsense. Not everyone is an "audiophile" (in a bad sense) who believes in silver speaker cables.