Hi Cenk,
i’m not so experienced with manual Subwoofer setup, so only a few thoughts on this:
Subwoofer and speaker phase and timing aren’t necessarily the same, just because they are placed close to each other and in equal distance to the listening position. Especially if it is an active sub, there can be quite a difference in these parameters due to the electronics involved.
However, if there are no apparent dips (= cancellations) in the crossover area of speakers and sub when both run together, I would guess there’s no major phase difference between the two and you’re good to go. I would recommend measuring both speakers and sub individually from the same microphone position and compare the curves to make sure the dips are caused by the room and not by speakers and sub running together and cancelling each other out.
From what you describe i guess, your speakers run full range and the sub runs in parallel and you EQ the overall response. That should work, but you don’t get the extra benefit of relieving the main speakers of the bass frequencies this way.
If you properly high pass filter the main speakers and low pass filter the sub in the miniDSP, you gain better control over the crossover area and by relieving the main speakers from heavy bass work you might get more SPL reserve in total and a clearer midrange from the main speakers, especially if it is 2 way or 2 1/2 way design.
A trick for your setup might be to tune the sub around +10 dB too loud on purpose and have the EQ level down the total response. This way the sub does most of the bass work and the main speakers are partially relieved of bass through the -10dB EQ applied.
Hi Roland,
Thank you for the tips. I’ll do separate measurements as you said. I recall Greg has a nice guide on his web page. I have 3 way speakers with 2 drivers only for below 260hz so I think I’m in luck with you +10 db trick.
Thank you
Hello, Just wanted to let you know how cleaner the bass became after I put some pillows under my subs. I have been tinkering with eqs, placements, crossovers for weeks. Trying find delicate balance between no bass and muddy bass. It’s resonance, turns out. Decoupling on wood floor. Definitely. Now HouseCurve “sings”I hope it helps.
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Gadnoz_Seek
(Running low on working days until retirement...)
106
I bought the App and put it to the test in two rooms:
Living room without correction:
@Greg_Wilding i’m trying to use house curve by sending the test signal through a blusound node 2i. but, it keep starting apple music instead. any ideas? if this works, it’d be a great tool. i’m just finishing a more manual (and painful) sub adjustment in my small listening room.
Hi Tim, a few other Bluesound users have reported this issue: AirPlay triggers Apple Music to appear. There are reports of this issue elsewhere, so I suspect it has something to do with Bluesound hardware. You could try disabling Airplay handoff on your iOS device, or try signing into Apple Music once to make it stop. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it. If you’re willing to help me debug it, please shoot me a direct message.
Hello, I got 2 slabs of marble and 2 packs of drummer silicon stickers. They use it to attenuate the slam volume. It worked great as a speaker decoupling. Hope it helps. see pics.
Just thought I’d mention that I just did my nearfields at my desk - Paradigm Atom v.5’s that are sitting on Audioengine blocks. Have struggled with bass bloom and isolation since I created this set-up, but it was just so lovely to have nice speakers in nearfield that I just dealt with it. But now it’s all but gone. The difference is so much more noticeable than even in my 2-channel set-up where it was pronounced. And the original curve just showed how bad it was.
Would encourage anyone listening in nearfield to do this - it’s a profound benefit.
PS - do still hope you can set it up to “export all with similar filenames” or even better “export all and zip”. But like i said, this is the biggest audio bargain out there.
One other thing… Maybe because in this situation housecurve was doing so much correction, I actually had to set headroom to -12db in order to avoid clipping on tracks like Cold Brains by Beck. It’s definitely worth turning on the “turn the indicator red if clipping” in headroom DSP, because if your particular set-up needs a lot of work (you can see below just how bad it was) you can need to do more than you might have thought. It was audible on that particular track. Now sounds back to wonderful.
No wonder!
You’re boosting low bass by about 15bB, something that those little port loaded monitors aren’t made for.
Stereophile’s measurements also show steep roll off below 60Hz.
This correction likely produces a lot of excursion, as well as high levels of 2nd and 3rd order harmonics in that region, even at moderate levels.
Should I raise the level at which I’m allowing house curve to do correction up to 60Hz from the default 40Hz? Or is there something else I should do to avoid? I’m definitely new to this.
Edit - below is the result of setting the “bottom” of the curve to 60Hz instead of 40Hz. Was able to turn headroom down to -6db without any clipping. Learning by experimenting.
Any part of the correction going above the orange target with positive gain will cause clipping, if you play material in that frequency range recorded at or close to 0dB.
That’ll need negative headroom to compensate.
Try raising the low frequency limit until there’s no boost in your correction below natural roll-off and compare to corrections with boost, to find your sweet spot of enough extension and not overdriving the midbass chassis at your preferred level.
I released a new version of HouseCurve on the weekend. It contains some features the group asked for over the last few months:
The main feature is a curve editor that lets you drag+drop points or enter text (ex: cut+paste from forums). I also added the ability to export filters with 176.4 and 192 KHz sample rates. I improved how the app handles large/accessibility fonts, and fixed an issue that would cause measurements to not save (super annoying, apologies to those that impacted).
The next release will tackle some smaller items:
export saved measurements as impulses
export filters for all rates at once
filter impulse length control
possibly higher filter rates (ex: 384 KHz)
Thanks again for all your great feedback! Happy listening
The app uses the bottom iPhone microphone (default for the device). I hold the iPhone sideways (landscape) and point the bottom mic towards the audio system.
Try the default setting (40-4000 Hz) and see how you like the result. It’s more important to correct the wiggles below ~300 Hz. Above that, it’s more about shaping the response to the desired curve. You can find some more info and resources here.
Thanks from me as well for a great tool. Purchased right away after it quickly removed the bass boom of my soundbar under the bathroom sink
First tries using the iPad (Pro M2 12.9) mic with the living room Naim system, Sehring Audio S913 speakers (22 Hz - 32 kHz at -3 dB according to specs). Measurement average in grey. Not terrible I guess but quite an 80 Hz trough and 125 Hz bump:
Grey saved initial measurement, a single green measurement after correction (though I may have changed the volume in between). It smoothed the 80-125, not sure about the rest, it’s different but not clearly better. The initial prediction looked close to perfect. Any pointers for why that might be? Will have to play around more
If found a bit of an issue in the Roon signal path, because with the filter loaded, the speed multiplier changes between ~99x and above 100, so the multiplier keeps appearing and disappearing and makes the whole signal path content jump around.
It will it’s never fixed using dsp it will move up and down as it’s dependent on many things so if it’s borderline to start with it can jump out it showing and back. Simple correction though if it’s still 99 mines way lower than that with convolution in my Naim system but I do have large corrections in the low end to deal with as my room boosts bass extremely.
