Does anyone know how this compares to something like Sonarworks, which does a similar process but for a series of measurements across your room with a specific microphone they provide?
DIY Digital Room Correction with Linux
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: DIY Digital Room Correction with Linux
#22The biggest problem with home theater setups with surround sound, IME, is that no matter what you do most of the seats will get very uneven sound (typically, one or more surround speakers being much louder than the others). The only fix is to have a larger space so the effective "sweet spot" covers more of your seating (think: an large-aisle-width space around a 3x2 seat configuration) but at that point you're lookin…
I'm in the middle of a dedicated theater room project. We're doing 5 seats behind 4 seats, which is probably more than we'll likely use, but it does have the benefit of expected use will have people farther away from the side speakers. Depending on the seating costs and budget and other things, I think it makes sense to go ahead and put seats around the sides... in case you end up having extra guests, they can sit in…
> On a small budget, you can do a lot with just two decent speakers rather than speakers built into an ultra thin flat panel. Thrift stores often have nice speakers that may not be visually pleasing but are likely to be aurally pleasing.
This is very true, almost any separate speaker is going to be better than TV speakers, especially in the age of flat panels.
And one thing software room-compensation can do is let you build a surround system with mismatched speakers, without having to lose a day manually tweaking levels. No need to buy a full 7.1 or 7.2 set at once. Thrift decent pairs of speakers and orphaned subwoofers and let the software figure it out.
Re: DIY Digital Room Correction with Linux
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And I hate to be a snob about mics I wonder if you just need a mic with a calibration file? this one is less than $25: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00ADR2B84 and you can use the serial number to download a specific calibration file
In the end a mic is just a converter of air movement to electricity fluctuations. The hard part in measurement mics is that they don't show any characteristic that deviates from the expectation both in the time and frequency domain. Calibration files can help you in the frequency domain (provided that mic is stable over it's lifetime), but the time domain is a different beast as in: if we play a square click how well…
Yeah, for a one-off look at the room, then all this stuff is all overkill, IMO.
However, it's still fun to geek around with acoustics.
I mix stuff that other people listen to, and I operate sound systems in a variety of locations. My interest in this is mostly professional, though I think that it's easy to get a long way in that business without a lot of specific exploration, so really it boils down to being a fun and kind of nerdy hobby.
To your point about mics, Rational Acoustics, maker of the popular Smaart analysis program, have advised users that high-end mics might not be the most important element in a measuring system.
This is because most of the useful elements of acoustic treatment happen at lower frequencies, where the cheapo omni capsules work just fine, and these elements are not generally creating lower-frequency artifacts.
Re: DIY Digital Room Correction with Linux
#24It's fun stuff to mess with, but one difficulty is that you can't really affect time-domain issues by modifying output frequencies. That is, there are likely both issues induced by the phase response of the speakers themselves as well as issues introduced by reflections in the room which will cause uneven frequency responses in these measurements. These issues are inherent in speaker systems and acoustic spaces. If y…
> It's fun stuff to mess with, but one difficulty is that you can't really affect time-domain issues by modifying output frequencies. PEQ can take you a surprising distance. Many perceivable issues can be substantially reduced by attenuating signal at problematic resonant frequencies. At no point ever (IMO) should PEQ be used to boost the level of any frequency to make it more audible. FIR filters are where you can f…
I feel like that is why the article writer said it got them 80% of the way.
Pareto's principle indicates that the biggest 20% of work will provide 80% of the expected results, whereas to get the last 20% of expected results will require 80% of the work.
Doing a basic room EQ with the equipment you have on hand would mean that the spot you EQ'ed from would have a listening experience calibrated to the quality of the microphone at that location (but with a margin for error since they were not using any heuristic other than "make line as flat as possible in a single pass")
That's ~20% of the work in making a pristine audio environment but with close to 80% of the end results. Room correction, reverb baffling, bass traps, better speakers, fancier receivers with complex auto balancing algorithms all could definitely improve the end result but will take far more time and effort (and money) to achieve any noticeable improvement.
Re: DIY Digital Room Correction with Linux
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And I hate to be a snob about mics I wonder if you just need a mic with a calibration file? this one is less than $25: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00ADR2B84 and you can use the serial number to download a specific calibration file
In the end a mic is just a converter of air movement to electricity fluctuations. The hard part in measurement mics is that they don't show any characteristic that deviates from the expectation both in the time and frequency domain. Calibration files can help you in the frequency domain (provided that mic is stable over it's lifetime), but the time domain is a different beast as in: if we play a square click how well…
Can't you determine the time domain dynamically?