A guide how to do room correction and use it in Roon

@Jules_Standen, the UMIK mic is good advice, it’s a cheap calibrated mic and compatible with REW. I moved from REW to a DSP box and the mic was still compatible. There’s a new UMIK-2 model but it’s pricier. You might get a deal on a UMIK-1 somewhere?

If you order from MiniDSP it comes from Hong Kong and you may incur a customs charge on top of the price.

Good luck :slight_smile:

1.) a Sub will not have infuence on the levels above 300Hz.

2.) Clearly visable in all your measurements are the room modes (one very problematic one at 40Hz and 2nd, 4th like 80 and 160Hz). I would conzentrate on the modes the rest from this measurement looks OK for a “normal” room.

best regards,

Armin

Hi everyone,

A huge thank you to Magnus and everyone here that has contributed to this wonderful thread. I can only encourage anyone reading this thread that is on the fence to take the dive and give this a try.

I am not blessed with high-end equipment and I feel that in the world of mid-Fi is where this can be of most benefit. I purchased Roon Lifetime two months ago, still somewhat staggered that I did so and somewhat nervousness to have made such a financial commitment. That was until I purchased the UMIK and experiment as so many have done above.

I actually prefer to enter the bands manually within the Parametric EQ in Roon rather than export multiple convolution files. Maybe I simply like the pretty graph in Roon…

I am listening now in my office to an ancient Marantz 2225 and some (what should be awful) Goodmans M100’s. Yes I have a crazy 11 Peak adjustment bands activated. My main take-away from all of this is not to suck the life out of a speaker and take away any character, but to give the drivers an opportunity to perform and display what they are capable of by dealing with limitations that are present in your setup.

In my case these limitations that I’m addressing are 1) the speakers are on my desk, close to the wall, 2) the likely very poor speaker crossover that may not be allowing for smooth mid to treble transition, 3) native undesirable driver characteristics of the drivers themselves, and 4) my seemingly unwillingness to use sub woofers (somehow I can’t get my brain to accept sounds that I know are not being presented by the primary speakers I am listening to).

With the limitations above, largely any EQ adjustment boils down to compensating for room and speaker placement, speaker cabinet resonances, and bottom-end adjustment to achieve a flat response down to 50Hz.

Audiophile talk time? Nah. All I’ll say is that it has made my speakers ‘disappear’. The only thing I’ve changed from the original REW results is making the high frequency fall a bit stepper at 1.0db/octave, instead of the original 0.5db.

Now, regarding the $699 cost of Roon and the $75 UMIK. Such is the enjoyment I am now experiencing with my existing equipment in my office, I will be performing the same exercise in my living room. This means that I’m 90% sure I’ll be streaming only from now on via Roon, selling all of my vinyl, CD’s and associated equipment. I am going to be thousands of dollars better off. I’m tired of trying all of the equipment to get the sound I like and am so happy to have this digital adjustment come to the fore and be the revelation that it is. I like many others was concerned about the ‘true to source’ issues with applying conversion to the original file/stream. It must add some noise along the way, but my god, the benefits absolutely stomp on any (inaudible) quality concerns.

What’s the opposite of a rant? Like a positive rant. A ramble I guess. Apologies for this ramble, and the messy room. Yes that old ThinkCentre is my Core - I’ll move it to the garage soon.

Have a great day and enjoy the gear you have.

Mike

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I run room correction on my main system and in my office (photo below). I love my main system, but honestly it’s the <$1,000 office setup where I genuinely cannot live without room correction. Like you, I have some pretty extreme settings on the EQ, but it really does clean things up, removes all the boominess, and I can listen all day and be so happy. It’s actually my office system where I show people just how much of a difference room correction can make.

In terms of loading the REW export vs. typing in numbers to Roon - I’d suggest going with the REW export option. Now that there’s a one-click solution in REW to export all sample rates, it really is easier. I used to type the numbers in like you, but it’s now far quicker to export. Also @Magnus tells me that Roon’s PEQ isn’t as good as loading in the convolution files. Which probably doesn’t make a big difference on my office setup, but still it’s nice to know. :wink:

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What’s causing that?

There’s some discussion on that topic here:

Thanks for the informative link. So it doesn’t really matter if all you use is REW. I prefer the ease of use of the convolution files. But using convolution files makes it possible to also do phase correction, like in RePhase based on the filters calculated by REW. That’s where the added value is of convolution vs parametric eq.

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When experimenting I also sometimes keep it in PEQ until I find what I like, because its so easy to modify on the fly. But once I am satisfied with the sound I make it into a convolution file. I am not sure exactly why PEQ don’t sound as good, but I know different PEQs sound different.

Just ran rew in my office and kitchen, office is using near field monitors and didn’t notice a huge difference but the kitchen is like night and day. Speakers are on top of cabinets in corners of the room and has entirely cleaned up the boxy/booming. For a couple songs I sort of missed it, was great for low fi reggae etc but makes everything else so much crisper.

I reduced the peak db change down to 15 as it was trying to correct that 70hz dip in the right speaker, but wanted 16db of headroom to do so, pretty sure that’s just room and can’t be fixed with eq. With these filters I only need 3db headroom. I tried using pink noise / RTA first but it the base reduction was too extreme, made everything sound like listening to cheap headphones.

Also worth noting that I used the sweep measurements in rew 5.2 rather than pink noise, averaging five measurements per speaker. Used audio out of my Mac to airplay to speakers for the tests.

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Looks good, but you also need a house curve? Plan to use Roon PEQ for that?

To be honest, I skipped the house curve settings as I didn’t know where to get it.

Is that what the pink noise/rta is for? I think I read all the guides in this 800+ posts thread but never gleaned how I do the house curve.

Edit. Went back to the start and noticed the advice to search for the term. Doing that.

Edit 2. I see that could have lead to the thinness.

No, a house curve has to do with the way ear perceives sound: we hear lower frequencies at a lower amplitude and higher frequencies at a higher amplitude. A flat frequency response will sound very thin and boring, since to our ears its actually not flat.

Here is the house curve I use, copy-paste it into a new text-file and use it from REW -> Preferences -> House curve (you can adjust it to your liking later on, but its fairly standard):
20 6
50 5
100 2
550 0
5000 -1
10000 -2
17000 -3
18000 -5
19000 -10
20000 -20

Sorted, thanks.

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It actually has to do with the fact, that we do not perceive loudness as a function of the acoustic amplitude, but of the acoustic power of sound.
So, with the amplitude remaining constant acoustic power rises with frequency, as heard with white noise, for example.
Pink noise amplitude declines with 3dB per octave and thus is perceived as equally loud from low to high frequencies.

I had a little time over the weekend and did some more reading on room curves, back to the original research, in particular from Toole’s book and the consensus is a far simpler curve than you are using.

I settled for

20 2
1000 0
20000 -8

My feeling always that the fewest tweaks possible leads to the least chance of screwing it up.

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Mine is not so far:
30 3
200 0
2000 0
20000 -6

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This great guide gave me the inspiration to get started with room measurements, thanks for all the input in the 900 odd posts, took me a fair while to get through it all and as a complete beginner quite a lot of it went over my head but i am learning fast and am keen to improve.

I have set my room out as best i can regarding speaker positioning and done a bit towards room conditioning with rugs / curtains etc but suspect i could do a bit more.

After reading all this information i decided that first of all getting some reference measurements of what my room was doing would be a good idea and then try and address the results first with tuning the room etc before getting involved with filters, firstly to have the minimum amount of filter work going on as possible as secondly to get benefit whilst playing vinyl.

This is all very new to me so please excuse my inexperience or lack of knowledge if i get things wrong, i got thick skin so wont be offended if you take the mickey :grinning::grinning:.

Here are a couple of screenshots from my results and a couple of photos from the room, any advice would be really appreciated.

My first impressions of the results, which were taken with mic stationary on a mic stand behind sofa with boom over sofa so mic at ear level facing speaker being measured are

  1. i have a nasty peak at 32hz and a horrible null at about 68hz (thick foam treatment behind and beside speakers for these maybe?).

2)quite a wide null going on around the 200 x 400 hz mark, could the two armchairs be causing this?

3)everything over 400hz doesnt actually look too bad, i am a bit under the 75db reference line but maybe i should have calibrated a touch higher?

anyway it would be great to hear opinions from more experienced members…

Heres a few of the living room

Frequency response in the room looks ok (easily corrected), but when measuring for room you should use sweeps to get timing information and then look at the waterfall graph (or similar) to determine reverberation time.

Guide like this one can fix frequency response, but no DRC can fix to long (or to short) reverberation times.

For example, here is my waterfall graph in a very heavily treated room (measured with DRC in use):

What you should look at is the numbers to the upper right, which is milliseconds. Those should be fairly low when the sound reaches the background noise level (preferably 200-300ms), but don’t be surprised if you find numbers up towards a second for lower frequency, which will make a “punchy bass” impossible. Thunder and explosions will work good though :slight_smile:

You are doing it the right way though, fix room acoustics as much as possible, then use digital room correction for fine tuning.

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Ok thanks for that although not quite understanding all of it😩, can i take that sort of measurement in REW?

my first time ever using it or doing anything like this was just now when the mic arrived in the post😀.

I would also like to try and get the room as good as possible by adding room treatment or moving speakers a bit etc etc as i listen to alot of vinyl which goes straight into my amp so improvements in the room would benefit here as well.

Do you think looking at my measurements and room layout that thick accoustic dampening behind / on wall side of speakers would help? Thinking in regards to the big 60hz null and the null in the low mids? Thinking maybe some SBIR might be going on?