Acoustic Frontier's Hi-Fi and Home Theater Acoustics Blog

Room correction - why the needless analog to digital conversion?

2010-07-24T01:12:52Z

Last week I talked about the importance of letting any end user choose the frequency range to which room correction is applied and allowing them to specify a target frequency response. In this weeks article I cover the last two functional criteria for a room correction product. Whilst these are less important than the first two, they are still important, and just make good sense! This week I cover the importance of not performing needless analog to digital conversions and providing measurement and filter generation capabilities.

Two things a room correction product must do

2010-07-19T02:40:06Z

My research has led me the conclusion that there are a number of basic functional elements that ALL room correction devices should possess. These conclusions derive from a room acoustics viewpoint rather than a sound quality perspective. It is interesting that there are many devices on the market that do not meet these two basic criteria...

Stereophile magazine's top 6 Room Correction and EQ devices

2010-07-10T20:46:39Z

According to Stereophile magazine, the top ('A' ranked) room correction or room EQ devices are the: Audyssey Sound Equalizer; Meridian 861 with MRC room correction; Rives Audio sub-PARC / PARC; SVSound AS-EQ1; Velodyne SMS-1 and the Z-Systems RDP-1 Reference. This article explores the pros and cons of each device from a purely functional perspective...here is an excerpt from the section on the SVSound AS-EQ1: "Designed for use with either single or dual subwoofers, the AS-EQ1 is based on a implementation of Audyssey's DSP room EQ code. Plug in the included measurement microphone and install the custom Windows based software onto your computer and you are ready to go! Because it uses Audyssey code many locations in the room are measured (up to 32) before the correction filters are generated. This makes it particularly suitable for use in a multi-seat home theater where the bass response and therefore degree of correction required will vary significantly from seat to seat"

Room Correction: A Primer

2010-07-01T21:23:00Z

Much confusion still exists about what a room correction product does, what problems it can (and cannot) solve and therefore its 'place' in a modern high quality sound reproduction system. Part of the challenge of understanding room correction is that it requires a reasonable level of understanding of sound quality, acoustic science, acoustic measurement and psychoacoustics (how humans perceive sound). The majority of the articles I have read online or in print magazines do not cover the fundamentals in enough depth to allow the curious and committed reader a chance to understand room correction on anything more than a cursory level. By the end of this article I hope that you will have learnt enough to judge for yourself what room correction can and cannot do and how best to apply it in the context of a world class music or home theater system.

Acoustics First new website

2010-04-29T22:47:17Z

It looks like Acoustics First have developed a new website. A vast improvement over the old one and bang up to date. It is well layed out with great product photography and some interesting educational articles.

In case you don't know, Acoustics First is one of our suppliers. They do a wide range of aborbers, diffusors, combination absorber/diffusors and have a short lead time (3-4 weeks) for custom made products.

The Meridian approach to Room Correction

2010-02-24T04:01:35Z

Meridian's approach is the best I have found (both sound quality wise and theoretically) for electrically correcting the problems caused by a room. The Meridian digital room correction system follows the same high level process as other devices such as those by TacT and Audyssey (measure, compare, generate and then apply correction filters) but utilizes the reverberation time versus frequency response of the system. The system analyzes the deviation of the measured reverberation time from a target. Since the Meridian system only operates below 200Hz (i.e. below the transition frequency) it can take advantage of the minimum phase behavior of the room in this region, allowing it to correct reverberation time (or more correctly modal decay time) through magnitude based correction filters. Please read their white paper here.

Just moved home? The fastest route to high quality sound revealed

2010-02-24T02:56:45Z

I'm sure all of you have gone through the experience of moving house or moving your music/movie reproduction system into a new room. In some cases the sound will be obviously better but you may not understand why. Most typically though in my experience is that some parts of the sound will be better and some parts will be worse. And most of us are probably at a loss about why these differences have appeared. Having moved a lot myself (5 times in the last 5 years) I have come to the conclusion that having a good understanding of acoustics is the quickest way to getting good sound in your new space

New website content

2010-01-22T01:34:46Z

We've made some updates to website content to reflect our latest thinking on sound quality and how we approach acoustic design and calibration.

These changes came about as a result of an article we are writing on room correction which made us think about the fundamental sound quality, acoustic and measurement related knowledge that readers needed to understand before they could really comprehend room correction.

A page still needs to be created to explain some basics of acoustics and how everything fits together. Hopefully this should be up in the next couple of weeks.

There is also a short section up to give you a bit of background on who we are.

Living in a floodzone (we've moved...)

2010-01-19T05:24:16Z

Acoustic Frontiers has recently relocated to Kentfield. Hopefully there won't be any flooding like there was 2 or 3 years ago! Luckily we have a 4WD so will still be able to come and visit our clients!

Now selling Real Traps

2010-01-19T05:22:39Z

We are now an authorized reseller for the Real Traps product line. Anyone for a MondoTrap?