Room correction - what device works best?

There's a subtle difference between room and speaker correction.

Room correction you put the mic at the listening seat and you measure speaker and room combined.

Dirac only offers room correction (though a very good algorithm, and one I really like).

The DEQX separates out speaker and room correction into separate processes.

The speaker correction is done by measuring the speaker nearfield and windowing out the room response (or measuring outside). Then you take the mic and put it in the listening position like you would do with Dirac.

Not sure when people refer to Dirac if they are referring to the software package or a hardware unit with Dirac inside? Either way I understand it can't do crossovers. In case someone meant software, then Acourate can do digital crossovers, driver linearization, time alignment and room correction.

There was a comment above indicating frustration that DEQX could only handle 96kHz, and a great reply by Almarg. I completely agree with Al. To add my experience from another angle: at some point I was considering the 8-channel DAC e28 from exaSound, which can play 24/192 & DSD256 natively on 8-channels. It looked ideal for my needs. Discussing this with Uli Brueggemann from Acourate, he explained he tried it at 24/96 and a powerfull computer was running out of steam, suggesting 24/192 would be very very hard. So I dropped the idea, despite my computer being very powerful (server motherboard with Xeon processor, etc).

Acousticfrontiers,

Can you explain what the benefits are from separating room and speakers into 2 distinct steps? From what I can tell from the Dirac website, they are also doing some speaker correction, which appears to be from the listening position in the listening room.

Thanks for your helpful clarifications.

Simplistically speaking above 250Hz (room's transition frequency - look that term up) the frequency response at the listening position is dominated by the speaker. Below 250Hz it is dominated by the room.

The idea behind speaker correction is that you are measuring and correcting for the on axis speaker anomalies only. The correction applied can be higher resolution than room correction, which necessarily must use multi-point measurements and time domain smoothing to prevent over correction.

Room correction you cannot separate speaker from room, so if you apply "full range room correction" like Dirac then you are correcting the combined response. The best full range algorithms are very gentle in how they correct above the transition frequency. I only like Trinnov and Dirac at the moment.

Like Kal from Stereophile found in his review, the best results would be combining DEQX speaker correction with Dirac room correction. However parametric EQ, when applied in the bass as DEQX intended will get you just as good results as Dirac, it just takes a lot more time and expertise to get it dialed in.

Thank you for that excellent clarification.