Room Correction and echo/reflection

I have a very echo-y living room/listening room. It’s a large room, about 21 feet wide, 42 feet long (not a good ratio?), 12 foot ceilings. With no sound playing, a snap of the fingers lingers for quite some time. As this is our living room (i.e. my wife’s room) acoustic treatments are not compatible with marital bliss.

My understanding of room correction is that it is quite good at modulating frequencies. However, is it able to benefit/correct a room with many hard surfaces and echos that decay slowly?

Have you been here?

I have looked at this thread, and many others here… I’m struggling to understand how equalization can help as my issue is reverberation. I do have a quiet weekend ahead of me and this trying this can perhaps give me a sense of what there is to gain without investing substantial time and money.

The question remains though, can echoes be attenuated with DSP?

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I would say Roon treatment comes first. Sure depends on what SWMBO allows, but a highly reflective room with bare tiles, walls and windows will be a hard nut to crack. DSP room correction can only do a certain amount of magic.

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It’s all about negotiation skills. Deal with interests not with positions. Find out what’s important to her and find acoustic panels she might like.
Still might be an impossible mission. Good luck :wink:

You can’t really adjust for first and secondary reflections with DSP, you need to treat the room for these as much as you can. DSP helps with peaks and nulls in frequency response and some can also help with some speaker phase alignment (house curve does not) but not remove the affect of reverb or slap echo which are reflective.

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You could go with things that she would probably be cool with that would help with eliminating the echo.

Thins like plants, floor rug, curtains, wall accessories, furniture. The more stuff you have will curb the echo chamber. Then you could experiment with the placement of these objects.

–MD

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You might find this (the start of…) something helpful

I think in this video (possibly the follow up, where he replies to viewer questions/comments) he references his German engineer friend - who did some great work on how carpets etc do almost nothing to attenuate reverb

My Lyngdorf 3400 has room correction built in - my room is mostly bare, but I do use some large diffusers behind my Quads. The Room Perfect system works very well, but I am careful to get basic setup correct before I use it - the end result is an impressive soundstage, deep and wide and well focussed

I made the mistake of over-treating my room and it killed the soundstage - caution required in my experience

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If you mean by “modulating frequencies” that room correction can adjust/flatten frequency response, that is true. However, that can be done with something like a parametric or graphic EQ. Strictly, room correction means correcting for the acoustic effects of room dimension and surfaces and it is usually implemented by DSP. Given your described circumstances, it is unlikely that any REQ will completely correct your issues but correction for room modes below the “critical frequency” is what it does well. That will reduce the perceived reflections and with FR corrections, I believe that using a good REQ application will be effective and worthwhile.

I do not know what your system is so it is hard to make a specific suggestion.

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I’ve read enough about this today that I think there is a chance it may be of some benefit. So I optimistically ordered a microphone that will be delivered tomorrow. I will give it a crack and let you know what I find.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions.

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It’s a new house and over time I’m sure we’ll add accoutrements which may or may not help… :wink:

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Unfortunately our interests with regard to audio are orthogonal :wink:

Fortunately, the system as it is with the room as it is, is on the excellent side of satisfactory. It is not as good as my other home, which is large enough that I have My Domain. This Shared Domain does require negotiation and trade offs. I accept that.

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The main living room in this house as similar length and width to yours, but 18 foot ceiling, with a steel and glass walkway, mezzanine, hardwood floor, a mostly steel and glass wall to make things complicated. When I first visited with the agent, the way footsteps and speech sounded told me we’d need to tame room modes. That’s what made me switch to Linn Klimax gear, and with the help of my dealer set Linn’s Space Optimization to tame those room modes pretty effectively. It’s possible that other room correction systems are equally effective.

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If it feels like a task too far, you could always take the measurements and use a professional service - for example, HAF will send you a demo of the filter effects on a track of your choice, so you can see the difference for yourself. No affiliation, other than as a longstanding, very satisfied customer - you’ll find there’s lots of references to Thierry’s work on the forum.

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I would recommend FocusFidelity Designer software and @Focus_Fidelity will also help you out with questions.

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The microphone came today. I installed REW, took measurements and created convolution filters. I’m very pleased with the result.

I am kind of feeling my way through this, using @Magnus guide and some of the many YouTube videos out there. It was a very basic first try and like I mentioned, the result is a definite improvement.

Me being me, I’ll not leave well enough alone and will continue trying to figure out this software.

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Today I figured out how to create sweep files and a calibration file and save them to Roon so that I can see the before/after effects:

The pink and red plots are with convolution on. The blue and green are uncorrected.

The big improvement I’m noticing is the excessive midrange between about 500 and 2000 Hz. There are some other improvements in the low-mid and upper bass sections, but I think that midrange hump is what was bothering me. So perhaps my primary objection was fixable… The difference between the highest point on the blue plot (right-uncorrected) and the corresponding red plot (right corrected) is about 5.5dB.

Interestingly, the big hump at about 53Hz is the corrected and uncorrected left speakers. The left wall is dominated by a very large sliding glass door that extends from the speakers to beyond my listening position. Perhaps nothing can be done about that…

Still playing with this, but the improvement in the midrange has made this time very well spent.

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