Is DEQX a game changer?

Unsound,

You are right: certain software packages can do that. I'm not sure Dirac can, though. I believe it is focused on digital room correction only.

Acourate (another software package) can do digital room correction, and digital crossovers and allows to time align the different channels, and also linearize the drivers. In fact it's in my plans to use Acourate in my server and feed a multichannel DAC to drive two powered subwoofers and three stereo amps driving tweeter/midrange/woofer, and no XO on the speakers.

My advantage in taking this path is I have disposed of other sources and now just use a very optimized PC (optimized in hardware and software). Clearly not the same as using a laptop either.

Like Bifwynne, I'm having a hard time of letting go of my beloved tube preamp - Lamm LL2 in my case.

For those interested I suggest reading a couple of articles over at computeraudiophile.com by member Mitchco, who's very knowledgeable:
An intro to Acourate
Time alignment walkthrough

I follow this thread with much interest as I see the DEQX as able to do the same things, in a simpler way albeit more expensive.

Al, since I'm posting I wanted to throw in a comment directed to an earlier post of yours. In Acourate, the treble, mids and bass need to be in different channels for the software to be able to time align them. I believe the setup you were planning with DEqX had just one channel for right and one one for left (from a digital processing point of view). I would double check DEQX would allow you to time align the drivers in such a setup.

Lewinskih01, i thought that we had a lengthy debate on Acourate in the "Sloped Baffle" thread with Roy Johnson & others & we (mainly Roy J) concluded that Acourate did not have the Math right to correctly check the impulse response of the speaker & correct its response? I'm pretty sure that you were part of that discussion. Despite this did you still decide to use Acourate? thanks.

Very curious to hear more about others' use of the analog input into the DEQX. As a vinyl guy, I worry about losing some of that analog magic, though I recognize that the benefit of the speaker and room correction could very well outweigh the possible loss of sound quality that comes from A-D-A conversion.

11-22-14: Lewinskih01
Al, since I'm posting I wanted to throw in a comment directed to an earlier post of yours. In Acourate, the treble, mids and bass need to be in different channels for the software to be able to time align them. I believe the setup you were planning with DEqX had just one channel for right and one one for left (from a digital processing point of view). I would double check DEQX would allow you to time align the drivers in such a setup.

Thanks, Lewinski. Your interpretation of my intended application is correct. And the very question you raise had in fact occurred to me some time ago. But the writeups at the DEQX site make very clear, as I interpret them, that in addition to being able to time align independently powered drivers, their present-generation processors can also restore time coherence (to a good approximation) within and throughout however much of the audible spectrum can be reproduced by whatever each of its output channels is providing a signal to. Otherwise, for one thing, that processing would be worthless with respect to correcting the coherence issues of in-speaker passive crossover networks that are higher than first order (6 db/octave).

Also, I don't doubt that were I all mixed up about that, Drewan, Psag, et al, would have pointed that out to me when I described my intended system configuration.

Best regards,
-- Al

Lewinskih01 is partially correct if Almarg is only using a pair of full range speakers. There will be no opportunity to manually adjust time alignment but DEQX will still take care of this

The processor will automatically phase & time align what it hears during the measurement and calibration processes but there can be no manual time alignment as there would be when using 6 channels or 2-way plus sub(s)