As far as I know (I am no guru on the fundamentals in DSP) Audiolense and Acourate are developed with different views on what is optimal DRC. How would you describe the two, what's different with respect to sonic results?
That may very well be the reason why you are so satisfied with DRC. Trying to DRC your way out of a hopeless room can give really nasty results. I think there are quite some that believes receivers with DRC give 'perfect' sound at all conditions.
Exactly right - DRC is in no way a tool to fix a bad room. But to optimize a well thought out setup. Especially Time Domain Correction usually gives horrible results in "bad rooms". So you have to do your homeworks first - Treat the room as best as you can, find the optimal placement for speakers and multiple (!) subwoofers and your listening area. Only then the setup is ready for a final touch of DRC.
Audiolense is geared towards a turn key multichannel solution. Its user interface is great and very intuitive. It has all the features to implement a HT setup with any given channel configuration. Acourate is very different from that approach. It is like a scientific acoustic calculator which also can be used to generate filters. You don't work with multichannel setup but on a per speaker basis. The user interface is quite raw - geared towards the DIY crowd. But it shows much more information, better analyzing tools, much more options (eg. different XO filter types).
To my ears, in my room, with my setup I get much better filter quality with Acourate. I have been optimizing my Audiolense filters over the past year - Acourate with default parameters bettered the best I was able to achieve with Audiolense... Especially the preringing artifacts with Audiolense TTDC are not an issue with the latest Acourate version anymore (Bernt is working on Audiolense revision 4.3 which "is said" to make this much less of an issue as well). The basic psychoacoustic model behind those two apps seams to be very different - I get much different results when using the same measurement, same target curve, same correction parameters. For me Acourate works much better.
You can send Uli Stereo impuls measurements and two test music tracks of your choice and see for yourself how Acourate works for you!