07-Dec-2014, 22:34
Hello Phil,
It seems a long time ago since I did those experiments, and I've learned a bit since that might make me do things a little differently now!
To reply to a couple of the points you mentioned above:
I was also a bit surprised that Dirac "just worked" with AIR on my Mac - both for measuring the room and (more so) for correcting it. Whether this would also be true on a PC, I'm not sure.
On my 2008 MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo) I measured a CPU load of around 3-5% due to the Dirac Audio Processor when playing 16/44 material from iTunes. The load due to iTunes and AIR is each also about the same, making a total of 12-15% or thereabouts. I guess the loading would go up with higher sample rate material.
I agree with your comment that the corrected response still looked a bit rough. Subjectively the corrected system did sound noticeably better, mostly in the bass (not surprisingly). I should probably point out that this was pretty much my first go-round with Dirac and FuzzMeasure so I was more interested in getting some quick results to have an idea what might be possible, rather than trying to fine tune for the best possible outcome.
I've since done quite a bit of work on integrating my sub-woofer more carefully, and have added the DSPeaker Anti-Mode 2.0 which subjectively does a better job than Dirac of sorting out the sub-150 Hz part of the spectrum. (Much as it pained me to add another box, it does mean the correction gets done for all sources without having to run software on a general-purpose computer. As Kari pointed out in another thread, you can now buy a dedicated box from MiniDSP to run the Dirac correction software.)
My impression so far is that full-range computer-based room correction is probably not a "set and forget" operation, but something that one might want to continually tweak in an attempt to flatten out ever smaller kinks in the measured response. For what it's worth, I think I've decided that I don't have the inclination to do that at the moment, now things are sounding broadly right (to my ears). I might come back to it one day, though.
Ian
It seems a long time ago since I did those experiments, and I've learned a bit since that might make me do things a little differently now!
To reply to a couple of the points you mentioned above:
I was also a bit surprised that Dirac "just worked" with AIR on my Mac - both for measuring the room and (more so) for correcting it. Whether this would also be true on a PC, I'm not sure.
On my 2008 MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo) I measured a CPU load of around 3-5% due to the Dirac Audio Processor when playing 16/44 material from iTunes. The load due to iTunes and AIR is each also about the same, making a total of 12-15% or thereabouts. I guess the loading would go up with higher sample rate material.
I agree with your comment that the corrected response still looked a bit rough. Subjectively the corrected system did sound noticeably better, mostly in the bass (not surprisingly). I should probably point out that this was pretty much my first go-round with Dirac and FuzzMeasure so I was more interested in getting some quick results to have an idea what might be possible, rather than trying to fine tune for the best possible outcome.
I've since done quite a bit of work on integrating my sub-woofer more carefully, and have added the DSPeaker Anti-Mode 2.0 which subjectively does a better job than Dirac of sorting out the sub-150 Hz part of the spectrum. (Much as it pained me to add another box, it does mean the correction gets done for all sources without having to run software on a general-purpose computer. As Kari pointed out in another thread, you can now buy a dedicated box from MiniDSP to run the Dirac correction software.)
My impression so far is that full-range computer-based room correction is probably not a "set and forget" operation, but something that one might want to continually tweak in an attempt to flatten out ever smaller kinks in the measured response. For what it's worth, I think I've decided that I don't have the inclination to do that at the moment, now things are sounding broadly right (to my ears). I might come back to it one day, though.
Ian
Roon (Mac Mini), Wilson Benesch Full Circle, Expert 1000 Pro CI, Kaiser Chiara
Warwickshire, UK
