Looks like a similar concept to the Barefoot Monitors that where all the rage 10 years ago.
I don’t like the sound of DSP - it does nothing to fix the fundamental issue. I will allow some adjustment in the ultra LF (where our sensitivity to group delay is low) but I haven’t heard anything that ever sounds better or at all natural when adjustments are made above 150Hz. I guess some ears are more sensitive to EQ. Remember that adjustments for the primary sound by DSP to compensate for the room are not going to correct any original imbalance caused by higher or lower room reflectivity/modes. The ONLY way to get the best sound is to treat the room so the reflectivity or RT-60 remains balanced across the frequency range. Ideal setup is a speaker with ideal response and even off axis directive that and a room with consistent RT-60. For a large domestic space, a consistent RT-60 of about 0.4 or below above 150 Hz is desirable. Any bumps in RT-60 will not be properly corrected by use of speaker DSP - even though the combined primary and reflected energy frequency response might be even - the ear/brain will detected the imbalance between primary (direct) and reflected sound.
Analogy. You can measure light intensity at the listening position. You can adjust the intensity of a spot light to match that of an omnidirectional light source at that measurement point (this is what DSP is doing). Logic says light intensity is the same - therefore it should be the same for the person at that measured position. However, everyone who enters the room will easily see with their eyes the huge difference between a spotlight and an omnidirectional set of bulbs.
DSP is not recommended. It is far from the magic fix all that proponents think. Sabine’s original work in the area of reverberation time still stands. Room size and music genre should be considered in order to select the optimal reverb time.
And ideally that is all true but those of who live in rooms that are purposed for their look, family utility, multi purpose nature and have speakers that are hard won in terms of acceptability or came from the last house etc etc just have to make the best of what we have. So DSP May help a bit.
True. The article linked to above however seems to elevate DSP to a level that exaggerates what can be achieved. DSP is not a cure all but more of a band aid.
@dabassgoesboomboom ‘will be’ is correct. I’ve had some mail conversations with Martijn Mensink of D&D lately. I believe we’re talking RAAT here.The essence is:
“Roon streams to one of the 8c’s in a zone. This master 8c then redistributes the audio to the other 8c('s) in the group. All 8c’s sync to the master clock.”
“As a Roon device it accepts up to 192 khz. All incoming signals are converted to the DSP’s working rate.”
“I had to ask the software developers but the answer is yes, we do actually reclock the signal”
“Roon takes full control of the volume control in the 8c’s.”
I absolutely agree on this one. While I like dsp for crossover designing I don’t like it that much for room correction. I see so many people fiddling around with room correction while their loudspeaker/room interaction is fundamentaly flawed to begin with. Most audiophiles never think about how a loudspeaker would actually integrate in their room while shopping for loudspeakers, and that is the utmost important thing to get right of anything in the whole playback system. No dsp in the world can cure that afterwards. Well maybe a little, but if you have heard the postive difference of room correction dsp you certainly would be flabbergasted if you heard a correct loudspeaker/room interaction. Unfortunatly most loudspeakers on the market today do not fit the average livingrooms.
I find such absolutist views unrealistic and unhelpful. Of course it is correct, but irrelevant. I’m not going to give my listening room a complete acoustically correct treatment, not because I lack the space or the money, but because i don’t want to.
Music is very important in my life, but not exclusively. I love listening in my main room, with art on the walls and on pedestals, and a glass wall where I can watch the lake, still and calm, or in a howling storm, or the twinkling lights of the far shore reflected at night. Windows behind the speakers is not ideal. But I like it. DSP helped tame the problems. It improved the sound. Is even better sound possible? Probably. But I don’t want to live in a studio look.
Car racers will tell you how to make a car perform better, reducing weight by removing sound insulation and stereo and air conditioning, but I don’t want to. I also don’t want to ride in the back seat of a limo. I enjoy driving a performance car, with a reasonable compromise of comfort and elegance.
Sail boat racers will tell you how to make a boat perform, but most people want to sail as fast as possible with the comfort of a salon and galley and shower.
DSP is a great tool. First, to build a speaker, with otherwise unrealizable correction of implementation problems like crossover phase and time anomalies; second to tame its problems of interaction with the room; and third to tame problems of the room itself. Those steps are progressively more difficult, but none are without value.
That is a common mistake amongst many audiophiles. You really do not need expensive ugly acoustical treatment. In fact, changing your room into a recording studio makes things actually worse. Loudspeaker/room interaction has nothing to do with overdampening your room, like I said a cpmmon mistake. Moderate lively room (not a bathtub) with enough diffusing elements like bookshelfs, furniture, art on the wall, etc. Combine this with a loudspeaker with a very broad constant directivitity (preferably all the way from 20hz to 20khz) and e voila.
I have seen and heard these kind of room treatments you are referring to but it’s not the way to do. They put a loudspeaker with a pretty bad acoustic power response in a typical living room and try to improve it’s response by dampening the early refelections. You have to think the other way around. It is important to have an even reverbant field. In pther words, what you need is a flat frequency response thst is still flat in the reverbant field 20 msec of delay later. That is the kind of thing dsp room correction can not do for you it can only make it’s effect a little less worse. You can however make clever use of dsp in the loudspeaker design itself to give it a more even power response. Something like kiii three does for example. Cardioids like the kiii, omnis like MBL or dipoles like Linkwitz design all adress room interaction way better then a typical boxed speaker. A boxed speaker with dsp room correction applied is not the same thing.
What I don’t understand about many audiophiles is that they discuss minor differences between cables, power supplies, etc etc to death while they do not want to adress the most important part of the whole audio playback chain, loudspeaker/room interaction.
I prefer the real sound of the room without manipulation by DSP - even if it isn’t perfect. You do not and I think it is perfectly acceptable to disagree - I prefer one compromise and you another. All I really wish to point out is that DSP is not without drawbacks or trade offs. Sorry if I sound absolutist because I do understand everyone has different priorities and audio has to fit in comfortably between everything else - budget, aesthetics, WAF etc.
On an additional note, I would caution about boosting nulls in DSP because clipping can occur all too easily. Nulls are often impossible to boost enough to get a flat response.
Siegfried Linkwitz (RIP) had the right idea - use a DSP (or ASP ideally) before any amplifiers to tame the speaker deficiencies that couldn’t be designed around physically to work in an average untreated living space. I have Orion, Pluto, LX521 and LXmini and can honestly say that in all locations I have heard the speakers playing the room is far less of an issue than with your normal box type designs. I have no special treatments in any of my rooms where I use the designs and couldn’t be happier.
Agreed. I have the DSP7200.2s and I wouldn’t part with them for anything analogue. There’s none of the nonsense of trying to match speakers with amps and crossovers. You just plug in the mains and the CAT5 and they do the job. Beautifully.
I know what you mean, @AndersVinberg. But some people have more than one car or more than one listening room, exactly because they don’t want to make such compromises. I don’t think that’s necessarily “unreasonable”. It all depends on people’s priorities (and on how much money they can/want to spend on such hobbies).
Sure. I would not criticize anybody who makes a different choice than I do.
I was just objecting to the absolutist view rejecting DSP.
Similar to rejecting digital correction of lens anomalies.
Or twin-clutch transmissions.
Or digital enhancement of single malts (haven’t you heard?).
DSP-based listening room compensation is always a compromise — by definition! That’s not an “absolutist” view. Many people are happy with such a compromise, others are not. It all depends on what you want to achieve…
Amplifiers are a compromise. Speakers are a compromise. Listening in a room smaller than a symphony hall is a compromise. Listening to jazz in a room by yourself, without a bunch of enthusiasts around you, is a compromise. Listening to Hendrix stone cold sober is a compromise.
The question is, is DSP a useful technology to improve the audio experience.
It’s all a compromise, if you listen to blues music you need to keep in mind it originated from poor and opresseed people who had nothing. Two nails in a post some wire and an old bottle twanged by children was the beginning of slide guitar.
So, do you want perfection, authenticity or just to enjoy music? Something in between is all you will ever get anyway…
Quite clearly, this is neither a statement against digital room compensation nor against compromises in general. Just because someone calls a rose a rose and points out that roses usually have thorns, doesn’t mean he or she can’t appreciate the beauty of flowers. There’s absolutely nothing “unrealistic” or “perfectionist” about this way of thinking.
Jeremy, your description of speaker DSP relates to far field room correction, which requires external listening position acoustic measurements. The thrust of this thread, though, seems to be Dutch & Dutch and Kii loudspeakers, neither of which to my knowledge implement listening position measurements and DSP far field room correction. Rather, they use DSP internally to obviate the need for RLC analog crossovers, to linearize frequency and time domain responses in the near field, and to control polar response via constructive/destructive interference from multiple drivers.
This is exactly why active speakers have advantages. DSP in this instance is simply a mathematical way to implement filtering and phase adjustments for a multi driver active speaker that would normally be done in line level circuits. I guess it makes sense considering most modern music starts off digitally anyway. It offers the ability to do things like a notch filter on a driver to a much greater degree of accuracy than analog. (Although it is always preferable to use a driver that doesn’t require notch filters to begin with). The only concern with this approach might be latency from DSP processing and jitter or other digital artifacts. Latency could affect multi-speaker surround sound setups that use a mix of speakers.
