@teajay @grannyring - Preparing for the purchase of some room treatments has me studying up on room acoustics. This youtube video addressed the role electronics, speakers and acoustics play in the sound we perceive. I found it informative. Yes, still a relative noob.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bbmWd00HYM Long story short - Acoustics play the major role, followed by speakers then electronics. Bad acoustics can totally destroy the detail and resolution you were hoping to get out of that expensive dac. "All the recording engineers, whose music we are listening to, are listening to speakers that were carefully placed in a room and equalized. Good enough for them who do this for a living, should be good enough for you, as long as you use a good quality equalizer."-Anthony Grimani, MSR Acoustics, President
Personally, I've never heard room correction not improve a room, but that was with sparsely treated rooms. What I've never heard is a well treated room, with full tube electronics compared with and without room correction.
The new sound I got from the Raven Blackhawk came through my Gallo 3.1s beautifully. No class D like digital nasties or listening fatigue, and far greater texture and tone all while running correction. I'm still open to the existence of artifacts of correction, especially when there are 30dB untreated room mode swings.
A crazy looking wideband filter to perfectly counter untreated room effects requires unlimited taps and digital filter coefficients. Think infinite fourier series. In addition the cost function balances phase and magnitude response (digital mixed phase FIR filter from Live Dirac ), so phase corrections can still come at a price of frequency response ripple or vice versa.
I read somewhere that room corrected tone/timbre, presence and the overall naturallness of sound dramatically improves once treatments were employed. This makes sense to me given the limited resolution of even the best room correction.
Fixing the number of coefficients allowed, a transfer function curve fit is orders of magnitude more accurate if the target curve is smoother or better behaved (treated room).
Live Dirac only cost $400, makes the most dramatic positive changes of any one component I've experienced. I'll turn it off if ever I don't like it.
Anyone see a reason not to use GIK?
