I have an amplifier + dac/streamer + speakers and a Roon Nucleus Plus (with internal memory and linked by ethernet to the dac/streamer).
I have just bought a UMIK-1 and I have a notebook
My scope
I want a tool/software able to measure the sound performance in my room
I want a tool/software able to find out (automatically) the best sonic set up for my speakers
I want to use the output of the procedure above in Roon’s convolution filter
So
Which is the the best and above all, esasy software to use? I don’t undestand nothing about technical tools. I have installed REW and it is a hell of software. For me is like read Chinese.
I also have given a shot to Home Audio Fidelity but I am not able to have a simple answer by the guy who run the company.
I would not go for this as its really for those with more understanding of Room correction and its not cheap it offers way more but if you want simple I would try House curve if you have an iphone as its cheap to try it out and get used to understanding taking measurements and how filters work. Or use Home Audio Fidelity (HAF) to make filters for you, you just use thier measuring app and send the files on. His service is 2nd to none and will tweak for you until your happy.
REW is not super complicated if you follow some walkthrough but definitely has a much steeper learning curve and far more manual work. With Focus Fidelity the hardest part is kicking everyone out of the room when doing measurements
Focus Fidelity all the way, not cheap but the results are great. Tried HAF and whilst yes it made a difference I never got a set of filters that I could live with. You can only go back and forth so many times, with focus fidelity you can se your ears and just keep tweaking to you get the sound you want.
If anyone tries it and are disappointed (as I was at first), in the filter magnitude tab drop the filter gain down to 4 or below otherwise the sound becomes lifeless, well it did for me.
I would say it IS very easy to use. In a general case, run Impala (the measurement app) first to record your room response, save files, open them in FF, and you can just click “Next” through the wizard to generate a convolution based on default settings. That should be an improvement already, but afterwards you can invest as much time and effort into tweaking them as you want.
I’ve never worked with HAF. I am sure they can generate very good convolutions, provided that you can explain what exactly you want and that you do measurements right. And never change the system again.
If you may need to geenrate convolutions for more than one system, or want to have different ones for different uses, or foresee changing something (speakers, furniture, etc.) and are willing to invest an hour or so of your time, purchasing something like FF probably makes more sense.
FWIW, I finally got around to generating convolutions for my office setup. Took ~20 minutes to generate a correction to Harman curve. And of those 5 minutes were spent digging through the closet for a headphone wire to connect the laptop to input on the PowerNode I use in the office (alas, it does not have a proper USB Audio input, and laptop does not have optical output…).
And since I have measurements and a Focus Fidelity project, I can generate other targets whenever I like without re-measuring, too.
Im sure HAF is great when it works but as in Boris reply below you need to explain exactly what you are hearing to someone then they have to interpret that into a filter. I found focus fidelity very easy to use compared to REW. I was disappointed with the results at first, but once I found out that dropping the filter gain gave the sound more life then Ive been happy ever since.
I still dont understand most of what FF does and Im not really inclined to dig any deaper, basically all I do is take measurements, load them up set a curve change the filter gain and see what it sounds like. If I dont like it I just play with the curve and filter gain until I get what I want.
I can also highly recommend Focus Fidelity Filter Designer. It’s really easy to use for beginners and still offers plenty of options for the advanced user.
For starters you can leave all settings you’re not comfortable or familiar with on default values and focus on the target magnitude editor to find the target curve that is most to your liking. There are quite useful tools to quickly design a target curve based on parameters (slope values, bass boost, transition frequencies) that allow for fine adjustments.
Once you’ve found a target curve to your liking, you can play around with other parameters and fine tune the results even more.
Besides the target curve design, which i mostly use to tame room modes, the time domain correction applied by FF in my experience produces really excellent results in terms of improved soundstage width and depth, layer separation and overall transparency making listening effortless and relaxing.
