I was wondering if anyone here had advice or recommendations about room correction.
I don't have a particularly high-end speaker setup right now, as I have mostly been focused on headphones the last few years, but I'm now looking to move in that direction.
Before buying better speakers though (I have a pair of
OK bookshelf speakers right now) I was wanting to set up some room correction first and see how good I could get those to sound. After all, higher-end speakers should benefit from room correction just as much as the ones I have now.
I've been experimenting with the demo of Audiolense as it lets you take measurements and apply the corrections to a 90-second music sample, and it's definitely making an improvement.
Right now my setup is all a bit thrown together though. I'm using my old Radioshack 33-4050 SPL meter with a generic calibration file hooked up to the line-in of my PC's on-board sound, and because I wasn't able to find any any long audio cables, I hooked up my Benchmark DAC2 through a long USB extension and used that as the source. (latency was too high via Airplay)
So I have some idea of what room correction is going to do for me, but I'm a bit unsure about how to proceed now.
For now at least, I'm only interested in stereo (2.0) correction, but I will probably want to correct the audio in multiple rooms.
I think this rules out Dirac as I believe they use a driver to process the sound locally on the PC, rather than offering a VST plugin or working with Media Center's Convolver.
Unfortunately, that was probably going to be my first choice as I've heard the Dirac software in use before, and it was very impressive.
As far as I know, both Acourate and Audiolense should work via Media Center's Convolver, and I'm not sure if there are other options that do as well.
At first, Audiolense appears to be the cheaper option at $225 for the 2.0 version, but it seems that the $530 XO version actually includes features which would still be relevant to a stereo setup?
On the other hand, there's only one version of Acourate and it's $390, which keeps things simple.
It seems like Acourate is the more advanced package, and comes highly recommended, but it's a lot of money when there are no functional demos for it, and Audiolense
offers you three months to return it if you're unhappy with the results.
I assume that if I'm already spending that much on the software package, I should also be replacing my SPL meter with a calibrated mic - which seems to be in the $150-400 range.
I'm not quite sure what to do about sound hardware though. I've read that you should be using the same sound device for both playback and recording for time domain corrections to be performed correctly. Is that true? I would probably have to invest in more sound hardware if that's the case. (or use the on-board audio)
It also looks like Acourate requires you to use a single ASIO device (no MME/DirectSound support) for both input and output.
It seems like you could probably use something like ASIO4All to use any devices you like with it, but there's probably a reason it does things that way?
I was thinking of buying the
XTZ Mic that Dirac recommend as it's only $140 and is a USB device, unlike most of the other calibration mics being sold - but that probably wouldn't work with Acourate (at least not without ASIO4All) and not if you need to be using the same sound device for playback and recording in these packages.
Another thing I was wondering about was room position. Both Dirac and Audiolense let you take multiple readings from different positions in the room so that it sounds good everywhere rather than only where the Mic was when taking measurements. Is this something Acourate offers as well? Is this feature all that necessary?
I know that I've only mentioned Acourate, Audiolense, and Dirac, but that's because it's all I'm aware of. I've not ruled out anything else if there's other software you would recommend instead.