Digital Room Correction vs Room Treatments
I finally got a mic and used REW to analyze my room. Attached is the freq response for 3 different speakers (Monitor Audio Gold Reference 20, Sonus Faber Electa Amator II, and Sonus Faber Concerto Domus).
They all show similar characteristics - at least the most prominent ones. I did play around with the Amators trying them closer together and more forward in the room, but the major characteristics you see were mostly unchanged.
With this magnitude and number of deviations from a more ideal frequency response curve, am I better off biting the bullet and just doing digital room correction, or can these issues be addressed with room treatments without going crazy and having the room look like Frankenstein’s lab.
Cost is a consideration, but doing it right/better is the most important factor.
If digital room correction is a viable way to address this, what are the best solutions today? My system is largely analog (80’s/90’s Mcintosh preamp/amp, tube phono stage), and streaming isn’t a priority (though I’m not against it).
If the better digital correction solutions come in the form of a streaming HW solution, that’s fine, I’d do that.
Just looking for guidance on the best way to deal with the room, as both serious room treatments and digital EQ room correction are both areas I haven’t delved into before.
Thanks all. If more info is needed, let me know. My room is 11.5’ wide and 15.5’ long with the speakers on the short wall. Backs of speakers are 3-3.5’ off the front wall and they’re at least 2ft from either side wall. Some placement flexibility is there, but not a huge amount.
OP: It occurs to me you are using gating and smoothing. Turn those off and re-examine your measurements. I think you can re-use what you've already captured. You'll see a much nastier image of your results. Also, when comparing speakers, it's very much worth measuring off-axis to see how good of a sweet-spot they would provide. Speakers that measure similarly on-axis may be crap off. |
Guys, really? Sorry to tell you OP that graph posted has a terrible response, about 20dB difference between the major peak and null. The null at about 58Hz is 12dB below the average. That’s a lot of musical information being lost in the most important range. The huge peak at 35Hz taking much longer to decay than the rest is going to make the bass slow and boomy. I don’t agree with DSP. How can it reduce the long decay times and it can not et rid of that null. No matter how much power you pump into it, it will just cancel with the same power. You can push the furniture and speakers around all day and you will still have peaks and nulls only at different amounts and frequencies. All rooms. I say again, all rooms will have these issues. To achieve a smooth response some absorption is needed to avoid long decay and address bass problems with at the very least a pair of subs. They do not need to be the same brand nor size but avoid ported subs and they must, must have variable phase otherwise you’ll be endlessly pushing them around the room. Any ports that resonate at only one chosen frequency complicate matters further. You are adding a frequency invariant bass source with no way of tuning it. OP I commend you for having the ability to measure as it’s the only way to remove guesswork. |
@erik_squires Thanks for spending the time to thoroughly explain those issues. I can easily turn off smoothing, but at some point, the curves get so crazily jagged (with no smoothing), that I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from it. I haven't figured out how to turn off gating yet. Trying to research that now. @lemonhaze Thanks for your input. When you say "some absorption", do you mean bass traps? If so, are there more economical solutions than the $500/bass trap solutions from GIK? Yes, with minimal treatment of the room, there's a definite tradeoff between dips at 58Hz and 180Hz. If I move my LP so the 58Hz dip fills in a lot, it creates a smaller dip at 180Hz. You can see that 5 posts above in the 60" LP vs 45" LP. I do see that 35Hz peak in the many of the plots posted by other people in different rooms, so that one seems common. The other ones seem more variable and a matter of trade offs. In a room my size and filled up with record, CD, and gear cabinets as much as it is, I think it's honestly unrealistic to entertain getting two new non-ported subs. I understand there's a proper way to do things, but I think the question for me is what gets me close enough or good enough to live with while still keeping my room as usable as possible. Because if getting things closer to ideal requires my stepping around subs or having to contort to access my media because a sub is blocking clear access to a rack, then it's going to be a daily irritation. Not sure I mentioned above, but this room is also a TV room with Atmos in-wall/in-ceiling speakers, so I'm admittedly trying to do a lot with the room and one of the consequences of that may be I'm not going to be able to do things as ideally as a pure 2-ch listening room. I do have a single HT sub (SVS 10" ported sub) and I could dual purpose that if it would help. It does have a phase dial. Since I'm using older gear, I'm going to need to sum my stereo signal to mono and then route it to my sub (no speaker level inputs on my sub, just a single RCA). I could play around with that and if I see the potential, maybe I start to think about how to move some things out of the room and consider a couple of ported subs. But the room just isn't all that big to begin with unfortunately. All that being said, I am open to room treatments, preferably beginning with ones that are highest bang-for-buck and seeing how much that improves things before going too far down the rabbit hole and diminishing returns. |
Overall, if you did this ONLY with EQ, I'd flatten the 35Hz and 95 Hz first, and then raise the entire level bellow 150 Hz to taste. Bass traps are a good idea, but may be too expensive. Adding a subwoofer in the right location, with the low pass filter set high could also help. May take some experimentation, adds more hardware and of course, is expensive too. |
