Up until a few days ago I used that approach for digital room correction, and if done correctly (and somewhat conservatively) you can get a big improvement in sound. Its a very good way (in my opinion) to get good measurement for amplitude corrections.
However, neither REW (nor rePhase) can calculate improvements in the time domain. In a well acoustical treated room this improvement is not that big, but its there. And the more asymmetrical and “bad” room you sit in, the more improvements you can get from improvements in the time domain.
So after reading some good stuff about Focus Fidelity I recently purchased a license for $250. Unlike some other programs Focus Fidelity is made for digital room correction and nothing else, and its very easy to use and the manuals are excellent. And it makes corrections both in amplitude and in the time domain. Link: https://www.focusfidelity.com/
So here is a little review of Focus Fidelity: its very good. Even in my acoustically treated symmetrical room it gave an increase in clarity with better defined and bigger soundstage. In fact, pretty much everything was improved compared to my old room correction. And the difference between not using any digital room correction at all and using Focus Fidelity is amazing.
I don’t think the creator of Focus Fidelity, David Broadhurst, is here on the Roon forum, but a DRC Guru is here, @Mitch_Barnett so if you have any technical questions above my pay grade maybe he can step in and help.
So the next time you consider spending hundreds or even thousands on upgrading a HiFi cable, first fix your room both with acoustical treatment and digital room correction. It gives way more improvements than any cable can do.
I’d absolutely consider it… This is a pretty striking review. I have an awful asymmetrical room (fireplace is not centered, speakers flank fireplace, one of my speakers is 30 inches from a corner, but only a half-wall, the other is basically I the middle of the wall with a wall of glass on the far side) and wonderful speakers (Devore o/96). There’s no way I can do real treatments in this room. I’m allowed to drag my speakers down to the basement to listen in a better room if I want, but I don’t like to be that anti-social.
Anyone else here using these tools? Would love to hear from more folks, because it sounds amazing.
Focus Fidelity and Audiolense are two solutions I hope to experiment with later this year. However, I’ve been a customer of AudioVero, using their Acourate solution for almost a decade with outstanding results.
I am a happy FocusFidelity User since late 2022 and can absolutely recommend it!
Before i have been taming bass modes in my room using REW and EQ next to two Helmoltz Absorbers that mainly tame the modes reverb, less the peak itself. Got a UMIK-1 back then, which is essential for good results.
Then i made the next step with HouseCurve (excellent app, also higly recommended, money well spent!), which also only works in the frequency domain, or did at that time. Works great togethet with the UMIK-1!
Based on positive reviews of FocusFidelity i bought a license in late 2022 to give the additional time domain correction a try.
As @Magnus already wrote, it is defintely is a noticeable improvement in terms of soundstage and cohererence since it also corrects for phase issues in the speakers crossover. There is no going back to uncorrected listening…
Designing mutliple custom target curve for different purposes (i.e. one curve to tame thin sounding 80s pop, one for low level listening etc.) also is a big plus!
I like the UI alot, its a well balanced desing, both for newbies (leave everything on default and focus on target curve design) and advanced users to tweak additional settings regarding limits and intensity of the correction.
The creator, David, is a pleasant contact and very responsive regarding questions on the software or room correction in general. I participated in beta testing the MacOS Version of the software in summer 2023, so we had quite some E-Mail traffic back then.
So two big thumbs up from my side and highly recommend!
Yes, the GUI is very user friendly and won’t scare away new users like for example REW. And this in combination with the fact that it does produce very good results is very important in software that target non-technical people.
Btw, for “Target” (house curve) I recommend “Harman”, the flat-tilted ones tend to be a little boring in my opinion. But maybe if you listen to classical those are better. Having said that, its easy to experiment since you can use the same measurements, just go back to the Target and change.
Also, the default number of measurements, 8, is a little strange, since you need one where your head is. The rest should be around and it makes sense to for example use 4 on the left side and 4 on the right side which means an odd number in total. 9 as default (or 7) would be better.
But apart from the above, I just used default values. The 9 measurements takes a little time to set up and perform but the rest of the process is very smooth, easy and fast. All in all I spent around 1 hour to produce the filters I use now (and it can be done much faster).
In case someone wants to try Focus Fidelity, here are how I did the measurements in Impala (free part of Focus Fidelity):
0: measurement “in head”
1: measurement at left ear, 10 cm left of 0
2: measurement 10 cm over 1
3: measurement 10 cm below 1
4: measurement 10 cm forward from 1 (towards speakers)
5: measurement at right ear, 10 cm right of 0
6: measurement 10 cm over 5
7: measurement 10 cm below 5
8: measurement 10 cm forward from 5 (towards speakers)
So 9 measurements in total, and these are for a fixed listening position (for a bigger area the measurements should be more spread out).
A question… I’ve been using House Curve with some enjoyment. I can see from the experiences above how much further the FF products have the potential to push my system. A question though - if HouseCurve is the “gateway drug” to more elegant, full featured solutions, how would you all describe the incremental benefit - house curve gives you 20%, 40% of what FF does? More? Trying to get a sense if I can for what I’m missing.
I have never used House Curve so I can’t answer that. It also depends on your acoustical treatment and room, and how good measurement microphone you have used.
Having said that, I expect you will get some improvements, hard to say in % though. My improvement with Focus Fidelity compared to using REW was about similar to a big upgrade in DAC quality.
As a proud owner of Focus Fidelity, I can confirm the real benefit to listening, and I couldn’t go back I generated two separate filters (left and right) for the convolution. I then loaded it into HQplayer’s matrix pipeline, using Roon simply as a library management tool without any special processing. The target curve is very important and has a huge impact on the result, which is normal. I think I’ve found the one that suits me best, and a new Focus Fidelity version has recently been released (version 2.0.1.0, now called Finetic). The processing flow differs slightly from the previous version, but I don’t know what the real changes are in terms of processing. And all this is sent to a Holo Cyan 2 DAC (so DSD Direct) and then to ATC 20A PRO active speakers.
From my experience the benefit of FF over HouseCurve was substantial and well worth the extra money. While using the same target curve you get the same tonality with both products, FF shines with the correction in time domain, giving a better defined / focused (pun intended) image and spatial information, making music feel more alive and more enjoyable.
I’ll give a quick overview of my room and system, so you can make a judgement how far this can be translated to your own listening enviroment.
The room is about 13 m2 large (or better: small) and almost square shaped.
so I have a nasty room mode around 48 Hz which has been dealt with two Helmholtz absorbers in room corners and one GIK bass trap in a ceiling corner, which mostly tame the reverb (RT60 massively improved), but not so much the peak itself.
Speakers are Elac Vela FS 407, placed about 60 cm from the wall and about 2,65 m apart. Listing distance is about 2,65 m as well (the magic stereo triangle).
The rear wall is ab 40 behind the head which is not ideal. So the rear wall has been treated with a set of Vicoustic Wavewood diffusor/absorbers.
The left side has a large window. On the right side is the door to the living room with glass inlets. Early reflections are dealt with “precisely placed absorbers” (sofa cushions) on the reflection points for critical listening sessions.
I get a good image and well focused center voice with this setup even without any correction, but the step forward with FF is noticeable with the music sounding less attached to the speakers and more like “being there” - depending on the recording.
If a had to put a percentage on improvements for my setup I would say:
40% room treatment for bass problems
30% digital room correction for bass problems
15% digital room correction for tonality in midrange and treble
15% digital room correction in the time domain
I to am very satisfied FF user. In recent years, I was using Dirac/ Bass Control in a multichannel configuration; two main speakers and 3-4 subwoofers. Although Dirac made a positive improvements in my dedicated/acoustical space,I was never fully satisfied with the bass resolution. That all change when I tried FF, the definition in the lower range was immediately noticeable, to where I will never go back to Dirac.
Keep in mind, currently FF is primarily designed for two channel configuration. But even though I am still using all 3 subs, FF is measured as if I have only two full range speakers - still I got far better bass than with Dirac measuring each individual sub.
I’ve read that sometime in the future FF is going to expand its ability to do multichannel with crossovers- Hopefully that will happen soon.
Sam
Here what I did when I had a sub with my stereo system:
Put the sub crossover to whatever you feel is good (I used 70)
Increase the volume of the sub so they in total play a little to much bass
Then do a normal digital correction as it if was a regular stereo system. Since you put the volume on the subs a little to loud the correction will lower the bass output, meaning it will also lower the bass-input to your regular speakers, thereby freeing them somewhat of playing deep bass.
Understood. But what unit or software do you use for the crossover or management? Do you set high pass (speaker) and low pass (subwoofers) or only low pass for subwoofer?
And can FF align the phase on the crossover frequency perfectly?
A little off topic, but here goes.
The outcome is to be expected, because an absorber in the corner sits at a high-pressure/low-velocity node, but it must be the other way around to be most effective.
If possible, try to move them to the wall center positions (as it’s s bit impracticable to put them in the room’s center ) for better effectiveness.
I set crossover on subwoofer physically, but let my main speakers play full range. I am afraid you won’t know how good/bad it is before you try though (you can get part of the way in REW which is free).
The term “absorber” is probably misleading and points in the direction of porous absorbers like basotect or mineral wool. This is not it.
I think the correct term should be “Helmholtz resonator”. Essentially it’s a large box with a hole, tuned to the room mode and filled with speaker damping wool. Those work best in room corners. I actually tried moving one out of the corner in a more convenient spot and immediately lost a large amount of the effect.
The Helmholtz resonators brought the peak down from around +25 dB to about +15 dB (-10 db), another 6 dB were achieved by closing the bass reflex ports on the speakers. The rest had to be leveled out in the digital domain.
Here some plots done with REW by the room acoustic expert who build and installed the Helmholtz resonators. This was done some years ago, back then with other speakers (Martin Logan Motion 40):
RT 60 went down from “off the scale” (>> 1 sec) to 0.7 sec @ 80 Hz.
The purple line shows the characteristic effect of Helmholtz resonators which work in a narrow band around the tuning frequency and leave two remaining peaks on both sides of the tuning frequency.
In combination with digital room correction by Focus Fidelity (back on topic, yay! ) im enjoying a fast, precise, boom-free and deep (-3 db @ 26 Hz) bass which puts a large grin on my face with tracks like “Blue” (Billie Eilish) or “Royals” (Lorde).
Thanks for mentioning the recent update to Version 2.x! I seem to have missed that. There was no need to open the app in a while since I’m happy with the current filters.
On a quick look I would say the former workflow step “correction bandwidth” has been replaced by the “correction level” drop down box in the filter generation dialog.
My guess is, this was done to simplify the process. The correction bandwidth was quite abstract (although nicely plotted) and probably too advanced for the average use. It could lead to horrible results when setting extreme or nonsense values.
A simple setting from 1-10 adjusting the correction bandwidth parameters in the background probably won’t scare you away from using it as much as the former dialog did.
Focus Fidelity is a 2-channel system. It doesn’t do digital crossovers, for which you would need a multichannel DAC and multiple power amps. But it can work with subwoofers that have been set up outside Focus Fidelity and then optimized with Focus Fidelity. You must set the crossover by a separate means.
If you require true digital crossovers, I believe Audiolense and Acourate are the standard choices.
I generated two separate filters (left and right) for the convolution. I then loaded it into HQplayer’s matrix pipeline, using Roon simply as a library management tool without any special processing. The target curve is very important and has a huge impact on the result, which is normal. I think I’ve found the one that suits me best, and a new Focus Fidelity version has recently been released (version 2.0.1.0, now called Finetic). The processing flow differs slightly from the previous version, but I don’t know what the real changes are in terms of processing. And all this is sent to a Holo Cyan 2 DAC (so DSD Direct) and then to ATC 20A PRO active speakers.
) for better effectiveness.