I'm not an audiophile in the obsessive-compulsive sense, but I've been recording music in my home studio for 20 years and I know my way around it. This sort of calibration is not ideal. Not only are you measuring with a device that has an imperfect response curve, but you are also measuring the room at a single monophonic point in space. The way that sound interacts with the room and your ears is far more complex than that. Ultimately, this is a bandaid for a poorly treated room. If you're serious about getting a flat response curve from your monitoring room, you're far better off learning how to treat the room properly and how to position your monitors within the room for the best results.
Calibrated (my Audyssey is +-1DB 20hz-20khz) mics do exist and calibration files do exist for some mics, plenty good enough considering how terrible the average house/apartment room is.
Your totally right about room treatment and why I don't spend more than the budget end of HiFi, because I know how terrible my room makes everything sound..
Ive measured a few rooms and sets of HiFi and the biggest issue I find is not the general frequency response, but room modes, they peak far more than even the frequency response from a cheap boom box. Without active EQ or a notch filter and extensive room treatment then trying to flatten out the response of a speaker is futile if you ignore the room modes.
Add in transient and phase responses and you add additional challenges to getting good audio.
It does however look great for helping me characterize differences in my 3D printed headphone designs. My old resin-printed design has incredibly good bass, and when I changed things up for FDM printing I lost all that low end. I need to try adjusting my design and quantifying the results, as I love the sound of my resin-printed design but would prefer to move to FDM designs as they are much easier to print and make.
> you're far better off learning how to treat the room properly
Would you have some pointers on this?
I've been looking into this and while I've found pointers on "what to do", what's missing is where to actually find the necessary panels and how to figure if they're actually worth anything.
Counter-point: The use case is making relatively-shitty speakers in front of the computer better, and single point in space isn't really that much worse than trying to somehow put speaker in place your ears are and accomodate for all that.
> Ultimately, this is a bandaid for a poorly treated room. If you're serious about getting a flat response curve from your monitoring room, you're far better off learning how to treat the room properly and how to position your monitors within the room for the best results.
Well, doh, but it costs zero dollars and very little effort.
This type of software, is just a bandaid and really doesn't work very well (though it can work better with headphones). Properly thought out and tuned acoustic work is what is needed.
I am lucky enough to have a spare room in my house, and set out to build a studio (an almost life-long dream) and decided that I didn't want to compromise on the acoustics and spent some time looking into the subject. In the end I built it myself with a huge amount of acoustic treatment (lost a large amount of the volume room), but more that that I enlisted the help of a professional who could do the maths and help with not just the trapping but also the panels that are needed. In the end after I built it was also tuned with DSP by the professional, has what you would normally call 4-way speakers with the subwoofers going to a higher frequency than most would consider normal and even the desk was specifically chosen
to not cause a problem for the listening environment. The difference between this and something like Sonarworks (commercial software that I tried for a laugh beforehand) cannot be overstated. It's basically flat between 23hz (slightly rises at 20hz I believe) and 20Khz - we actually tuned in a more natural response curve.
It's still a home studio because it's in my home and I don't do anything commercial with it, but it's pretty much mastering grade, all with materials that are available in a builders yard and the special sauce, someone that knew what they are doing. Not everyone has the room or space to do this, but most people can build some bass traps and something to tame first point reflections.
For starters, it doesn't try to achieve a phase-neutral response, because a phase-neutral response created in a room is only valid in one point of the room, and creates pre-echo artifacts elsewhere. In fact, it tries to separate the response of the speaker itself from the response of the room, by setting a threshold in the time domain, so that everything coming before it must be unaffected by the room. Then, everything coming before the threshold is corrected to a linear phase, while everything else is corrected to the minimum phase (thus making the second part of the filter purely causal).
Also, they provide an argument, citing literature, that equalizing to a flat frequency response would be wrong in a room, and thus provide an option to remove excessive treble and achieve a 1dB/octave roll-off.
> because a phase-neutral response created in a room is only valid in one point of the room
Author here. The term "phase-neutral" simply means here that the impulse response is symmetrical and doesn't add a phase shift. It doesn't even try to neutralize the phase characteristics of the room, which is what you may be thinking. In fact the phase information from the measurement is completely discarded. Furthermore, the frequency response is averaged to get a more general and robust (less over-fitted) correction that works pretty well across the room. Try it...
Newbie question: how do we know we can trust the microphone?
It sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem to equalize speakers with an equalized microphone, but maybe microphones are simpler and can be assumed to be equalized ?
This looks cool. I'm not sure if they are intending to go all the way to room correction but it can really do wonders. A good while back my music setup used filters calculated by an open source FIR tool with playback driven by an older version of Shairport (emulating an AirPort express) using BruteFIR as a convolver. Fiddly to set up but it sounded really good.
I'm a psychoacoustician and this is not the way, very sorry to report. Others have touched on the acoustic issues already, so let me touch on the psychological ones: your perception of sound from loudspeakers doesn't just depend on the acoustic waves hitting your ears. It also depends on your personality and expectations. If you genuinely believe that doing a seance to drive out the poltergeist from your speaker set up will make the sound better, it will be difficult to convince you otherwise precisely because the acoustics did not actually perceptibly change.
A friend loaned me a fancy usb DAC a while back and I used it to listen to music while I worked. After about a day or so I asked her if it was my imagination or if the audio really did sound better. Her answer was that there's no difference between those situations: if I imagine it sounds better, it does sound better.
It's an unwritten rule in the studio scene around me to have a specific fader that is prominently placed but does nothing. To use when certain musicians (usually guitarists) demand to raise the gain of their instrument into unreasonable territory. Seems to work reliably to look at them and very slowly raise that fader until the they say it's good
> If you genuinely believe that doing a seance to drive out the poltergeist from your speaker set up will make the sound better, it will be difficult to convince you otherwise
I think you just found the next big thing in audiophile fads
I genuinely wasn’t sure whether psychoacoustician was a cheeky synonym for audiophile or not. :). I looked it up and, sure enough, psychoacoustics is a legitimate field of study.
I have made a small webtool to help calibrate various EQs by ear. It kind-of mimics a graphic EQ in the browser which can also play tones around the EQs frequency bands, which should sound about the same loudness as their neighbors according to the ISO loudness curve. I increase or decrease my laptops EQ bands until the tones on the webtool play without obvious difference. This is sure to be an unsatisfactory process for technical purposes, and I couldn't even guarantee that I implemented the loudness curve well, but I have a lot more success using it to help tune EQ than without it.
I don't remember the exact order but way, way, way before the $10 K USD digital audio cable snake oil, audiophiles are going to say that DRC is the second single biggest thing that can enhance the quality of your setup (the first one being which speakers you're using and how you place them). Then source quality/amp/dac. And only way further down the line, for those who believe in voodoo, $10 K digital audio cables.
An objectivist audiophile would say that room correction is among the three or four grossly consequential parts of the audio chain. They are, in serial order:
0. Source material
1. Room correction DSP
2. Speakers (including subwoofers and crossover configuration)
3. Room acoustics (including positioning of speakers and listeners)
4. The human (ears, experience, expectations, ego, etc.)
All of the above are more consequential than anything else, assuming the core components are not total garbage, underspecified or malfunctioning. This includes the DAC and amplification.
Of the above list, I would place room correction at the bottom. (That still places it well above many things subjectivist audiophiles obsess over!) It is the cherry on top of a great system, not the means to achieving greatness. And it lets you get away with some things (most notably, mismatched speakers) to a greater extent than otherwise. But despite the name it can’t fix most real acoustic problems.
It can also make a system sound worse if it’s not used properly.
I remember I went to some audiophiles house once to demo some speakers, and his "hobby" seemed to have taken over the house and common sense. He had crazy expensive audio equipment and some of the thickest cables I have seen, with the cables all suspended on little bridges.
All this in a room which was basically a square brick construction with glass windows on 3 sides, no thought to any treatment. He didn't seem to understand that the room was effecting the sound more than any DAC, Amp, Cable, or any of the other voodoo that was going on. I couldn't properly demo the speakers because of a particular standing wave. I concluded he probably had a hearing problem, he concluded he needed to upgrade a cable.
I’ve tried this for my speaker setup. And the problem is that the frequency response is a function of volume. For example, the louder I play music the more the bass is accentuated. I think this is because of standing waves.
So the problem I find is that when the volume is low the bass is too low, and when the volume is high the bass is too loud. Only when I play at the same volume as the equalization was performed at do I get a good result.
This is a common psycoacoustic effect and probably not due to the loudspeakers or the room acoustics (which are linear): the (perceived) loudness of a tone is frequency and level dependent [1]. This makes sounds more bassy at large sound pressure levels.
Asking because I'm not smart enough: Is this kinda similar to what the Sonos Trueplay feature does? (Where you move your phone, and/or a mic-enabled speaker itself, around the room so that it plays and measures various frequencies to calibrate)
That one is an automatic room equalization, it's different from speaker equalization and it probably should be done after speaker equalization. But it's more useful for the end user.
The results are very good. I have studio monitors and a crappy room setup, and the calibrated sound is much better. I purchased the kit with the supplied mic.
That said, the software is unstable. To the point of uselessness. It caused so many system crashes that I - very sadly, because the results are so good - just don't use it anymore.
Hoping they fix stability in later versions so I can go back to using it.
So many negative comments here. I for one think this is absolutely fantastic tool to calibrate cheap television and computer speakers so they don't sound like complete crap. We're talking about almost 20dB variations on the spectrum here.
Cool project! I recently bought a set of iLoud MTM monitor speakers which come with a special mic which they use to analyse the room and correct for it in a similar way to this.
It makes a good difference to the sound - highly recommend the speakers if you are looking for a smallish set of monitor speakers that sound great and can be used very near field so you can use lower volumes.
Yeah, those are kinda cool. They have the added advantage that they don't have a huge amount of bass, though what they do have is impressive for their size to be fair.
But because of their size they don't always activate room acoustics in a crazy way, and a lot of people monitor with them fairly close so don't need them loud either further lessening the problems.
I'm finding the "this is a horrible idea" responses amusing. I don't know if there's something fundamentally different about the way this project works versus Dirac/XT32 or if the naysayers aren't familiar with it. Or maybe there's an anti-room correction sect of audiophiles that have remained hidden to me.
I think it would be cool to make a more advanced version that corrects for many types of nonlinearities: amplifier distortion and mechanical parts resonating badly.
I highly suggest getting flat neutral speakers first. Preferably high end studio monitors. What would be interesting is if someone can work on music-specific optimization based on a handful of inferences and ML.
A good headphone can probably still outperform a speaker system. The tradeoff is that you have to wear a headphone. In my case, I just hate them. It's just more pleasant for me to listen from speakers, despite the fidelity tradeoff.
Headphones are excellent, but I find I have a different experience with headphones compared to music coming out of speakers. Sometimes I prefer one over the other.
IAmGraydon|3 years ago
NGRhodes|3 years ago
Your totally right about room treatment and why I don't spend more than the budget end of HiFi, because I know how terrible my room makes everything sound..
Ive measured a few rooms and sets of HiFi and the biggest issue I find is not the general frequency response, but room modes, they peak far more than even the frequency response from a cheap boom box. Without active EQ or a notch filter and extensive room treatment then trying to flatten out the response of a speaker is futile if you ignore the room modes. Add in transient and phase responses and you add additional challenges to getting good audio.
TaylorAlexander|3 years ago
vladvasiliu|3 years ago
Would you have some pointers on this?
I've been looking into this and while I've found pointers on "what to do", what's missing is where to actually find the necessary panels and how to figure if they're actually worth anything.
xani_|3 years ago
> Ultimately, this is a bandaid for a poorly treated room. If you're serious about getting a flat response curve from your monitoring room, you're far better off learning how to treat the room properly and how to position your monitors within the room for the best results.
Well, doh, but it costs zero dollars and very little effort.
drcongo|3 years ago
timc3|3 years ago
I am lucky enough to have a spare room in my house, and set out to build a studio (an almost life-long dream) and decided that I didn't want to compromise on the acoustics and spent some time looking into the subject. In the end I built it myself with a huge amount of acoustic treatment (lost a large amount of the volume room), but more that that I enlisted the help of a professional who could do the maths and help with not just the trapping but also the panels that are needed. In the end after I built it was also tuned with DSP by the professional, has what you would normally call 4-way speakers with the subwoofers going to a higher frequency than most would consider normal and even the desk was specifically chosen to not cause a problem for the listening environment. The difference between this and something like Sonarworks (commercial software that I tried for a laugh beforehand) cannot be overstated. It's basically flat between 23hz (slightly rises at 20hz I believe) and 20Khz - we actually tuned in a more natural response curve.
It's still a home studio because it's in my home and I don't do anything commercial with it, but it's pretty much mastering grade, all with materials that are available in a builders yard and the special sauce, someone that knew what they are doing. Not everyone has the room or space to do this, but most people can build some bass traps and something to tame first point reflections.
danuker|3 years ago
Life has compromises. You do give up some things to build a perfect studio.
patrakov|3 years ago
For starters, it doesn't try to achieve a phase-neutral response, because a phase-neutral response created in a room is only valid in one point of the room, and creates pre-echo artifacts elsewhere. In fact, it tries to separate the response of the speaker itself from the response of the room, by setting a threshold in the time domain, so that everything coming before it must be unaffected by the room. Then, everything coming before the threshold is corrected to a linear phase, while everything else is corrected to the minimum phase (thus making the second part of the filter purely causal).
Also, they provide an argument, citing literature, that equalizing to a flat frequency response would be wrong in a room, and thus provide an option to remove excessive treble and achieve a 1dB/octave roll-off.
Please see the details at http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/doc/drc.html
erdewit|3 years ago
Author here. The term "phase-neutral" simply means here that the impulse response is symmetrical and doesn't add a phase shift. It doesn't even try to neutralize the phase characteristics of the room, which is what you may be thinking. In fact the phase information from the measurement is completely discarded. Furthermore, the frequency response is averaged to get a more general and robust (less over-fitted) correction that works pretty well across the room. Try it...
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
qbonnard|3 years ago
It sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem to equalize speakers with an equalized microphone, but maybe microphones are simpler and can be assumed to be equalized ?
tibbon|3 years ago
pier25|3 years ago
Schroedingersat|3 years ago
O__________O|3 years ago
AndrewUnmuted|3 years ago
[deleted]
zihotki|3 years ago
amluto|3 years ago
hedgehog|3 years ago
1. http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net
2. https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync
3. https://torger.se/anders/brutefir.html
ttpphd|3 years ago
aeturnum|3 years ago
kekebo|3 years ago
stdbrouw|3 years ago
bityard|3 years ago
I think you just found the next big thing in audiophile fads
ptk|3 years ago
IshKebab|3 years ago
strainer|3 years ago
https://strainer.github.io/hearqualizer/
TacticalCoder|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_room_correction
I don't remember the exact order but way, way, way before the $10 K USD digital audio cable snake oil, audiophiles are going to say that DRC is the second single biggest thing that can enhance the quality of your setup (the first one being which speakers you're using and how you place them). Then source quality/amp/dac. And only way further down the line, for those who believe in voodoo, $10 K digital audio cables.
simondotau|3 years ago
0. Source material
1. Room correction DSP
2. Speakers (including subwoofers and crossover configuration)
3. Room acoustics (including positioning of speakers and listeners)
4. The human (ears, experience, expectations, ego, etc.)
All of the above are more consequential than anything else, assuming the core components are not total garbage, underspecified or malfunctioning. This includes the DAC and amplification.
Of the above list, I would place room correction at the bottom. (That still places it well above many things subjectivist audiophiles obsess over!) It is the cherry on top of a great system, not the means to achieving greatness. And it lets you get away with some things (most notably, mismatched speakers) to a greater extent than otherwise. But despite the name it can’t fix most real acoustic problems.
It can also make a system sound worse if it’s not used properly.
timc3|3 years ago
$10K digital audio cables are never a good idea.
I remember I went to some audiophiles house once to demo some speakers, and his "hobby" seemed to have taken over the house and common sense. He had crazy expensive audio equipment and some of the thickest cables I have seen, with the cables all suspended on little bridges.
All this in a room which was basically a square brick construction with glass windows on 3 sides, no thought to any treatment. He didn't seem to understand that the room was effecting the sound more than any DAC, Amp, Cable, or any of the other voodoo that was going on. I couldn't properly demo the speakers because of a particular standing wave. I concluded he probably had a hearing problem, he concluded he needed to upgrade a cable.
runeks|3 years ago
So the problem I find is that when the volume is low the bass is too low, and when the volume is high the bass is too loud. Only when I play at the same volume as the equalization was performed at do I get a good result.
fhchl|3 years ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour
solardev|3 years ago
https://support.sonos.com/s/article/3251?language=en_US
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP3531714A2/
zihotki|3 years ago
NoPicklez|3 years ago
rcarmo|3 years ago
anotheryou|3 years ago
I'd say the worse your setup (especially your room) the more magic it does.
I did it without an individually calibrated mic though (but with a decent measuring one), wonder how much better it could be.
brandonmenc|3 years ago
The results are very good. I have studio monitors and a crappy room setup, and the calibrated sound is much better. I purchased the kit with the supplied mic.
That said, the software is unstable. To the point of uselessness. It caused so many system crashes that I - very sadly, because the results are so good - just don't use it anymore.
Hoping they fix stability in later versions so I can go back to using it.
RedShift1|3 years ago
127|3 years ago
tomduncalf|3 years ago
It makes a good difference to the sound - highly recommend the speakers if you are looking for a smallish set of monitor speakers that sound great and can be used very near field so you can use lower volumes.
timc3|3 years ago
But because of their size they don't always activate room acoustics in a crazy way, and a lot of people monitor with them fairly close so don't need them loud either further lessening the problems.
LeSaucy|3 years ago
tpict|3 years ago
etaioinshrdlu|3 years ago
tambourine_man|3 years ago
What qualifies as good enough?
Is it worth trying with consumer mics like the ones built ins on phones and laptops?
lvl102|3 years ago
timc3|3 years ago
amelius|3 years ago
jensgk|3 years ago
analog31|3 years ago
timc3|3 years ago
dfbb|3 years ago
[deleted]
chamod12|3 years ago
[deleted]