Dirac and room correction software

[PhilP]

I have a few miniDSP units , the Acourate (openDRC) , 4x10 and on Friday my Dirac unit arrived.
I have tried Acourate and open DRC on my D-premier and G1's and now want to biamp them and try DIRAC only on the bass section (I couldnt limit Acourate for the minidsp to do bass only , it does the whole spectrum.)
Initially , today , I intend to use Dirac full range and compare the results to Acourate and thereafter will do the biamping thing for bass only..
I will report back.
In the interim , I was using my trusty Z-sys RDP-1 parametric to take out some big bass nodes etc .. and it sounded pretty good.
AIR is unstable for me , so I use a Squeezebox touch..the DIRAC doing full range will be inserted after the Touch and into a digital input.
When I do biamping , I will use the minidsp on a variable digital output and have bought the board to convert my D to D to D to DA ($75) and will use it as a DAC as well (into a Crown CDI4000 just for the bass)

Very interesting - I look forward to your next update. I'm using my system in my study at the moment which measures approx 4.8m x 3.7m. I have the system firing along the room now because there are major bass issues when I fire across. However, firing across would be far better practically because of the position of windows, door and radiator. If Dirac could solve the bass problem for me and allow me to do this I would be very happy ;)

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... 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.

If the processor load is proportional to bit rate (which it may well not be ???) then that would imply 20-30% processor load for 24/192 files just for Dirac which is pretty high.iTunes and AIR load would increase as well.

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'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.

That's disappointing because I had high hopes of Dirac based on what I read on their site. It will be interesting to hear Rodney's conclusions. I just looked at the DSpeaker Anti-Mode 2.0 Dual Core spec on the web-site and it seems to have integral DACs. Are these always in the signal path?

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.

Oh no, that's the last thing I want. I just want 'set and forget'

Ian