Oh Room Correction, how Far You've not Gotten

I have been excited about digital signal processing (DSP) since the early 90’s. I remember, naively, only thinking about frequency response, then thinking about how it might be useful in overcoming stored energy problems in drivers, and even compensate for compression, anything that could be mathematically modeled. Along with this was the servo controlled speakers from Velodyne and Genesis. Oh what great ways we’d have to overcome the limitations of driver design and even physics itself!! The infinitely powerful, all knowing computer of Star Trek applied to audio would surely solve everything and make it possible for every average music and film lover to have mastering studio quality sound.

After having great success with manually configured miniDSP units in my modest apartment in San Francisco and movies I wondered to myself how much better would a "real" room correction algorithm be than what I could tweak by hand. I read a paper by Floyd Toole where he scoffs at the idea of "room correction" altogether. Surely Mr. Toole, this paper is now old and has been superseded by modern research! Surely room correction is now worth it’s label!

After living with and playing with the Anthem room correction built into the MRX 520 I can tell you that for at least this example, Mr. Toole remains undefeated. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent HT receiver, far far better than one’s I’ve bought and discarded before. Also, the subwoofer integration and web interface are pretty sweet. What it does not really do well at all is create an immersive or enormous sound field which I was able to get before using miniDSP and OmniMic.  I have big booms but not the credibility and transparency I was able to create by hand tuning the EQ.

Over the rest of this year I’ll spend more time and money investigating exactly what ARC does, and whether or not I can do much better by hand tuning.

A really frustrating part of my purchase is that this amp does not give me any sort of ability to set and modify individual filters. I have some overall level controls but nothing like the sort of control more advanced DSP software gives you.

P.S. - Many of you will automatically and correctly point out that room treatment solves many problems that DSP/EQ cannot. Yes, that’s true, but this is a well treated room already. I’m specifically looking into what the ARC has done or failed to do in the frequency domain.