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[babysnake]

Hi

I thought I'd share with members my experiences with getting Room Correction up and running for JRMC20 on the Mac and maybe encourage others to have a try

First off I am in no way affiliated to any of the software I am using, I'm just a mildly obsessive audiophile  

My setup is to run JRMC20 on a headless Mac Mini with JRemote and Gizmo for remote control over the network. Music is stored on an external 3TB USB HDD and consists mostly of FLACs ripped from my CD collection along with a few high res downloads and a smattering of legacy MP3s. Amp/DAC is a Devialet 120 (USB in from the Mini) into a pair of KEF Reference 1 standmounts. My room is a bit challenging - about 4.5m by 16m and I listen at one end and the speakers are about 1m in from the other end. The problem is mainly that the speaker end of the room is a double height vaulted ceiling surrounded with lots of glass (think conservatory) whilst the listening half of the room is a conventional height room with brick and plasterboard walls

Don't get me wrong the system sounds very good 'as is' but I have a noticeable hump at around 30Hz (15dB) with secondary 5dB ones at around 100 and 200Hz. As a result there is often noticeable booming in the bass and it was this principally that I was trying to correct

After must fiddling about, trial and error and general frustration I finally settled on the RoomEQ plugin from mathaudio.com but I had to play around a bit to get it to work

My basic starting point was the instructions here http://mathaudio.com/system-wide-eq.htm, although I never really intended to use this as system wide correction, but the standard VST plugin Sergey provides (http://mathaudio.com/room-eq.htm) cannot be used with MC for room measurement purposes, only to load existing .SNR files created elsewhere (at least I couldn't do it. There is a suggestion on the FAQ at MathAudio that this might work in Windows but I can't test that)

So in the end I followed the Mac system wide instructions partially to create the measurement and correction files (.SNR) which I then load into the VST plugin module for MC as I would any other plugin in the DSP dialogue

However, it was not all plain sailing as there appears to be a 'bug' in Apple's AU Lab which is used to do the room measurements (https://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/). The MathAudio instructions tell you to run AU Lab and create a document with your Mic of choice (in my case a UMIK-1 USB from http://www.minidsp.com/products/acoustic-measurement/umik-1) as Input and Output to your speakers, in my case via USB to my Devialet. I struggled for ages because I just couldn't get any measurements done, but in the end, with Sergey's help, I found that for some reason AU Lab chokes when both input and output devices are USB. I found the workaround here https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4095261 (adressler about 2/3 down the page) and once I followed those instructions I was able to get the measurements done without any problem

Once I had these done and had saved the .SNR file, I installed the generic VST/AU plugin from MathAudio into MC, loaded the .SNR preset and was able to then play with the sound by toggling between RoomEQ and Bypass modes until I was happy with the end result. Then I saved that preset for future use, but of course it can be changed more or less on the fly, which is handy

The trial version of MathAudio's software 'beeps' about every 30 sec or so but this is removed with a $99.95 license key, which given the cost of alternative software and hardware solutions seems pretty reasonable to me!

So I now have Room Correction and am very pleased with the result. It's not night and day of course, what is?, but it's unquestionable an improvement in terms of taming my booming bass

I hope that all helps someone somewhere  

/n

[Bccc1]

I couldn't find any advantage over REW besides the ease of use. Did I miss something?
What I do:
Measure the Room Response in REW and let it calculate correction Filters. To emulate the behavior of MathAudio Room EQ you would choose an overall max boost of 0dB.
You would then either generate a convolutionfilter for MC or manually add the filters in JRMCs PEQ. As those are IIR-Filters, there is no pre-echo. By choosing the max boost of 0dB you don't have overcompensation and resampling isn't a problem neither. These are the three advertised benfits of MathAudio Room EQ. Does it offer any other advantages?

[babysnake]

I don't think there is anything to miss as such and I'm quite sure the 'solution' that MathAudio provides can be emulated in other ways with different packages

But at the end of the day all room correction software solutions, including 'hardware' solutions which are software solutions with dedicated hardware, do essentially the same thing - measure the room response, calculate some correction filters and provide a mechanism to apply said filters via a DSP engine during playback

If you agree with the above, then it follows that ease of use and cost become major differentiators between the various options available

Dirac for example, which I have also tried, is also easy to use but costs significantly more (and FWIW I prefer the results I get with MathAudio, but that's an admittedly subjective viewpoint). Being Mac based I haven't any experience with Accourate for example, other than to say that it too is quite costly by comparison. I confess I haven't tried REW so cannot comment on the cost/ease of use issues (and I'm very much a Java paranoid so tend to avoid anything that requires it from a security perspective) but I have no reason to doubt that it's an excellent and equivalent approach

All I can really say is that I found MathAudio straightforward to use and that the results I achieved were well worth the relatively small financial outlay. I'm not aware that it confers any significant advantages over REW other than those

 

[mwheelerk]

Have you compared this to the JRiver DSP option ROOM correction and use of the Parametric equalized there.

[babysnake]

No I haven't, although given that I have a room measurement now, I might give it a go