I’m still tinkering - trying a “House Curve” which was put forward by @Magnus in this thread:
Looks like this once implemented:
Strangely, the audible differences between the house curve and my flat response are actually very subtle. The house curve sounds a little more ‘natural’ despite my ageing hearing cutting off around 16kHz.
What isn’t subtle is the difference between the uncorrected and corrected room responses. The difference in the “soundstage” is simply unbelievable (apologies to my fellow objectivists for the audiophile dictionary speak!). Width, height and depth are vastly improved. The centre musician/vocalist is very firmly centred and everything else’s locality relative to the centre is clear and defined. On some tracks, I can hear sounds coming from so far left/right and behind me, it feels like I’m sitting in a live venue.
I’ve been working from home today and in between phone calls and virtual meetings, Roon has been playing non-stop with a whole host of my favourite tracks and some new stuff. Musical enjoyment has moved up to an entirely new plane, and best of all the differences are quite clearly measureable!
Once upon a time, I used to frown upon DSP - probably because I didn’t fully understand it and it went against my ‘purist’ grain. Combined with a decent amount of room treatment, it’s the best money you can spend on your hi-fi by far.
I can see I’ll be tinkering for a while yet, though it’s confined to when my wife is out - she’s not really sold on me taking over the lounge with devices and cabling whilst playing test tones and waving a microphone around! 