SwissBear's system

[SwissBear]

Hi everyone,

Having been asked via PM about the active/passive room treatment and room correction I had done, I thought it could be useful to share with the community.

My system is:
Roon/HQPlayer with REW/rePhase correction impulses on a MacMini with Uptone MMK + LPSU -> SOtM sMS-200 with Uptone LPS-1 -> Mutec MC-3+ USB -> AES/EBU -> D900 -> B&W 802D3

Thank you a lot for taking the time to mail with me!

I purchased a Devialet 400 and B&W 802 D2’s a couple of weeks ago.
Then I progressed to Dirac, which made a huge improvement. After reading all the rave about Mutec MC-3+ USB, I also now have that sitting between the PC and the Devialet. So USB to Mutec and then AES/EBU to Devialet. This already sounds quite nice.
But as the Dirac is a trial version, I am now a bit unsure how to proceed. What is clear is that digital room correction is something I really must have.

Just yesterday I got a MiniMac and will now proceed to install Roon on it. Although as I understand it Roon has it’s own DSP, going through HQPlayer would be the best way? This would also then enable me to use the room corrections at this level of the system. And if I want to go down this route, I basically have 2 options: Acourate and REW/rePhase. With Acourate I would have to make the filter in PC, but could then use it on the MiniMac I understood from what you have written on the Devialet chat.
The advantage of REW/rePhase is the added flexibility, although it requires investing more time in understanding the whole process.
Am I getting it correct so far?

Another question I have had a hard time finding an answer to is how does room treatment relate to digital room correction?
Do you have any experience in this field? Would it e.g. make sense to also consider bass traps etc. to further improve on the sound? In a way, is everything possible to do with digital corrections?

On the first question: Acourate vs REW/rePhase, I would say that both provide very reasonable results. I have a small bias in favor of REW/rePhase as I spent more time trying to achieve the best out of it, and I was also involved in the process of organizing the interface between REW and rePhase by their respective developers. Having said that the cost for the Acourate license is not huge, and certainly worth the saving in time if making measurements is not your cup of tea.

So my personal recommendation would be to start with Acourate, together with this short e-book: https://www.amazon.com/Accurate-Sound-Re...ourate+dsp

Then, if you are still motivated, you can dig into REW/rePhase.

To illustrate the differences, a few charts:
SPL: I sligthly prefer the blue over the green, but both are much better than the rose one
[img][/img]

ETC (Energy Time Curve): the pics after the first impulse represent the early reflections on the walls, ceiling aso. Slightly better managed by rePhase than Acourate, but nothing significant.
[img][/img]

Distorsions: same comment here
[img][/img]

Step response: this is where I found rePhase better (having reached a correction close to minimum phase with rePhase, I get a better amortization of the initial step than with other corrections). But Acourate has a better management of the pre-ringing, which is not audible in my setup.
[img][/img]

On the second question: passive vs active room correction, I would say that both are complementary. One thing is difficult to master with passive correction, and this is the level of bass. Having had difficulties implementing my 802D3, I can imagine that you might be facing the same difficulties with you 802D2. But speakers positioning (1st) and active correction (2nd) helped me a lot.

On the opposite, I had a very high level of reverberation in my room (nakes walls, no carpet on the floor, aso). My RT60 was north of 1.2s which is awful. I had an acoustic ceiling implemented last September and this really changed my acoustic life. I now have 0.4s RT60 on most of the spectrum, which is fine. An illustration is given here with (red = without ceiling, blue = with ceiling). The picture represents the Energy Time Curve (time the energy takes to decrease). You can understand that I have a much better audibility now than before.

[img][/img]

On the last unanswered question which is using Roon vs HQPlayer for room correction, I would answer that I had HQPlayer before Roon and I kept it. I also have the highest respect for the work of Jussi Laako, the developer of HQPlayer and trust he has better upsampling/convolution filters/technology than the competition. Finally, using HQPlayer in NAA mode is what brought the best level of emotions to my listening. So this is where I am sticking. But you can decide for your own as HQPlayer offers a 30 days trial license. My recommendation would be to solve the acoustic problems before moving to this stage as the cleaner your sound is, the more you will be able to notice differences in sound quality further down the road.

Hope this helps.