Room correction - what device works best?

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.

As many of you already know, I own the DEQX PreMATE. It took a couple of sessions with Larry, the DEQXPert, to dialed in my rig and I am quite satisfied.

No need for me to repeat what Al (Almarg), Drewan and other believers have already said. Suffice to say, I give the DEQX a Thumbs Up.

I don't have the luxury of a dedicated listening room and, therefore, have significant challenges dealing with a well furnished living room. I use the Behringer DEQ2496 with the microphone to balance for my listening position. I've tried other methods but this approach allowed an improvement that even I was able to hear and I'm not very good at detecting subtle changes. I can't comment on phase issues associated with its installation but assume that it will cause some shifting. The bottom line is, save for well chosen upgrades of other components in the audio stream, that it may be the best choice I've made to improve listening enjoyment.