REW Room Analysis

I wonder what JV would have thought about DSP optimisation? :wink:

The DSP bit is kind of irrelevant, letā€™s not beat about the bush we are talking parametric tone controls hereā€¦ nothing moreā€¦ and in the end thatā€™s what I use it for to match my listening positionā€¦ I see nothing wrong with quality tone controlsā€¦ I prefer to do it in a controlled way rather than playing around like I used with interconnects, speaker types, speaker cables, cartridge types, cartridge impedance matching etc etcā€¦when in the 80s and 90s tone cone controls were seen as a vulgarity.

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Wholeheartedly agree (is anyone beating around the bush?)

Possiblyā€¦ I notice some people refer to tone controls as ā€˜DSP room optimisationā€™ as if it some how legitimises it over using the term tone control, or tone eq.

DSP of course is just the tool, the digital domain providing considerable flexibility, including parametric EQ useful for helping with some room effects.

Within the limits of power capability DSP can of course also be used for other tweaks, including wider boost and cut akin to traditional tone controls -but much more adjustable. The beauty is that people potentially could adjust the sound to their preference, whether rolling boosting high frequencies to compensate a bit for hearing deficiencies (as long as others without such deficiencies arenā€™t present!!), boosting the passband of some instrument or other to enhance, reducing bass at might because of neighbours, or boostting bass when playing quietly to compensate for lower ear sensitivity. Yes there may be negative effects on sound quality as a consequence - but they may well be less noticeable to the listener than the desired positive effects of the tweaks. I think this is an area ripe for wider expoitation.

@Simon-in-Suffolk could you better explain the process and comment the final result?
Are you still using the filters?

Within Roon I have used the EQ to slightly compensate for a very slight upper mid peak I have in my room. I also attenuate the very deep bass to paradoxically increase the power and punch of bass and very high treble above about 18k which adds to a sense of naturalness in my roomā€¦ kind of like a phononpreampā€¦ although my speakers and system appear to naturally fall away around here in my listening position.
In actual measurement I have mini peaks and troughs through the frequency range from 1k to 6k, and I leave these alone ā€¦ I prefer it un adjusted other than as I describe above.

Hopefully that makes senseā€¦

All this talk I had just had to go and buy a suitable mic. Done. Canā€™t wait to have a play :slight_smile:

I bought a calibrated USB MIC-1 for use with a DIY active speaker project + DSP some years a ago, I had great fun seeing what i was hearing! It greatly assisted my understanding of what was going on.

Since then I have used it in my new home to predict and understand the acoustic issues which I hear. I donā€™t use any DSP in my present system, but REW is very helpful in my understanding of the way my system behaves in my room. I have not ruled out the use of DSP and I can see how this would help to resolve some issues without causing matrimonial challenges when proposing room changes and treatment. :0)

This :slight_smile:

So Iā€™ve been reading the pdf help guide over lunch. It looks like I can create a test track to play over the systemā€¦ obviating the need to connect PC to input of the NAIM - yes? This also sidesteps any quality issue with the sound card playback as well - yes?

Not done that so I donā€™t know - sounds good if it does the trick. Iā€™m not sure how it syncs, though resumaby it is easy enough for REW to lock on when it hears it knowing about to start. No connection hassle, and system exactly as you normally use it: great! Iā€™ll have to have a go myself - maybe find that the very top and bottom roll offs are different, maybe distortion, too!

It creates timing ā€˜ticksā€™ in the file.

Oooh, thatā€™s a neat trick.

The older version I had certainly didnā€™t have that, but I havenā€™t checked out the new one, could be very useful when I take it to other peoples houses (except for vinyl nuts!).

lol

So you didnā€™t prepare a FIR but you worked with rew after any eq adjustment right?

Yes, home cutting of disks is a bit of a challenge! There used to be boothes at railway stations where you could do that!

You mean did I create a filter kernel for the room conditioning filter? Well I did, actually you create a kernel for each sample rate and pack in a zip file.
It all worked well enough, but in the end I preferred the result of a simpler subtler filter that was less changing of the sound using the EQ filterā€¦with some manual tailoring of the response.

BTW FIR and IIR are filtering methods, not filters themselves.

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