Room correction with Acourate

I have a problem, hope you can help.
Haven’t touched this stuff in a while, but now I want to do another room at home, and later my son’s system. So I got my laptop and mic and tried, and it didn’t work.

When I was successful before, I didn’t know how to set up Asio4All, I futzed around with the settings and got it working. And then I didn’t write down what I did. Stupid.

The Asio4All control panel shows the USB output plugged into my DAC, but it shows as inactive. The laptop speakers show as active. I don’t know how to change that. The Asio4All manual says that indication means the output us not active, it should be active. Thanks. When I went skydiving, the manual for the parachute says, the parachute should be open as a large umbrella above your head, if it is not, that means the parachute has not deployed. Equally useful.

I rebooted, things came up different, the USB output shows active but it didn’t work, and the Asio4All output switched later.

Do you have any suggestions?

(I have tested the USB output plugged into the DAC, using the Test button in the control panel, and it works correctly. After that test, I thought maybe the control panel didn’t release the device so I rebooted, that seemed to help temporarily but not longer term.)

The selection buttons in the asio4all control panel don’t allow you to unselect one and select the other?

Those are to the left of the names? Really small, because of high res screen. No. They work, because I can sometimes get action, but can’t deactivate and activate an output.

Anyway, if you confirm that’s the place to do it, I think I have to find what other system has locked the devices.

Thanks.

I got it.
I got annoyed by those small buttons, so I went into control panel and increased the display scale factor to 200 %. This generally doesn’t work for most software, and sure enough Acourate was all messed up, but the Asio4All control was now legible. More importantly, clicking on the buttons worked!

So I selected the right mic and USB output, set the display scale factor back to normal, minimized and restored the Acourate window so it cleaned itself up, and ran the procedure. Worked great. (With the help of Mitch’s book…)

Here are the before and after results. This is a 15’ square room, lined with books on three walls, a glass wall left of the chair. Speakers are Mark & Daniel bookshelfs, literally sitting in the bookshelf.

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Excellent! And very nice curves.

I just bought Acourate two days ago and now I’m trying to make it work with Roon. The problem is that I am using a Roon ready endpoint (SOTM sms200Ultra streamer) so the communication between the server PC and the streamer is via Ethernet cable. However, the mic measurements were taken with the PC connected directly to my Holo Spring lvl3 DAC via USB cable.

I generated a set of convolution filters and imported them with Roon. Everything works but the sound just isn’t there yet, I am not 100% happy. Could it be because the filters were created based on PC-USB-DAC measurements, whereas the playback looks like this: PC-Ethernet-Streamer-DAC?

How do I get to the final chart in Acourate that shows the corrected left and right curves against the target curve?

The difference between network and USB connection should not have a (significant) difference on the filters generated. Those connection style differences are much more subtle than the effects of room correction, and the differences of good and bad room correction. IMHO.

If the sound is not great, I think it is more likely that you can do some tweaking in what you generate with Acourate. As discussed here and there, Acourate is a toolbox, not a push-button solution.

Wrt the measurement, I think there may be a way to record the signal and use Acourate to measure through Roon, but I didn’t find it. I did find a way to do that in REW. So this is what I did.

  1. I ran Acourate with direct connection to the DAC, calculated the filters, and used Acourate’s technique for simulating the result. (One of the macros.) A lot of iteration here, until the results look good, not just frequency response but time (group delay) as well.
  2. In REW, you can ask it to export a sweep signal, including timing signals (beeps) before and after. I loaded that signal in Roon’s library. You can create separate left, right and stereo signals.
  3. Set up REW with the mic. Cue up the REW test signal in Roon. Click measure in REW. Hit play in Roon. The beep will tell REW to start measuring.

I found that the REW frequency response measurement was very, very close to the Acourate simulation.

If you figure out how to do the same thing in Acourate, please publish it here.

I found Mitch Barnett’s book invaluable.
It goes into a lot of stuff that is irrelevant to this room correction (such as creating crossovers), but the step by step instructions are great.

@hifi_swlon Do you use that setup? You might also check your inbox :wink:

Can someone get me started? This is my first weekend off in the last month and this has taken too much time. Strangely, I never got anything working with my fairly new windows 10 MS surface pro 4 but my old gen3 i7, with bad battery, broken keyboard and random reboots worked fine.

I can run log sweeps in the separate log sweep software that’s a free download from acourate. I use Asio4all. I’m using a emotiva XMC-1 emm1 mic (that I thought was a umik-1 until I looked for a cal curve) and the USB input on my emotiva XMC-1 processor - which are really 2 different devices. The logsweep software lets me pic inputs and outputs from the 2 different devices. But the output of the LS is not in the format that Acourate needs to run the room correction software (doesn’t end in the .tri). So I can’t test acourate - I’m on the 14 day trial right now.

In Acourate, if I run the logsweep generator, I get the same ASIO driver screen but it will only let me pick one device. so I can only pick an input or an output. If I pick the one that is for my latop, then i can pick both the input and output since they are the same device. so I can’t generate curves that way.

I never found the mic alignment procedure.

My emm1 mic does not have a 0deg cal curve, so i’d have to wait until I got this working then i’ll buy a calibrated umik-1.

Do you have to do this process for every sample rate you may set ROON too? So if you listed to DXD or DSD, can you still build the files you need?

I need to run this with my Vinnie Rossi lio as the output device, but with the driver loaded, when USB is selected, the ASIO4ALL screen doesn’t seem to find the LIO. So I just now realized, I’m running log sweeps with Dirac running, so i have to bypass that and run them again.

thanks for any help

I’m away from home and my system, but a few comments from memory.

I don’t know what separate app you are talking about, but I run logsweeps from Acourate itself.

Mike alignment is in the log sweep menu, I think.

Acourate needs input and output to be handled from the same driver, you can’t use separate ones. Asio4All is necessary. I have found it smewhat fiddly to get Asio4All set up - I click buttons and fiddled around and suddenly it worked, don’t remember exactly what I did. (One thing: I had my Surface Book set up with a default GUI scaling factor because of the high resolution of the screen, Asio4All didn’t seem to like that, I modified that setting in Windows, either bigger or smaller I forget, and that made Asio4All work.)

The logsweep does not have to be repeated for different resolutions. I did all experimentation and measurement at 96k until I was happy, then generated filters for all resolutions.

Mitch Barnett’s book explains the process, I have it on kindle.

Hi Acourate lovers.
Has any of you tried this new service https://www.homeaudiofidelity.com ?
Based on sweep measurements at 5-9 different spots (with REW or other software) they can produce convolution filters for Roon. Room mode cancellation / house curve / time alignment is taken care of, similar as Acourate.
On top they do reverb normalisation and (optional) X-talk cancellation which in my case spectacularly improved the sound stage and literally made my speakers “disappear”. I could not achieve this result with REW/Rephase.
I will run a test against Dirac soon but I am curious also about benchmarking Acourate, which is more Roon-friendly than Dirac.
The Roon thread is here Roon & Home Audio Fidelity (Room Correction / convolution filter creation)

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Yea, that home audio fi looks pretty interesting.

Esp since i’m still getting no where with Accurate. Ok, I guess I didn’t mean I need to use different drivers. I’m using ASiO4ALL per your instructions. On my old windows7 computer, I can pick an input and output device on ASIO4ALL but USB DAC, which works fine on all my computers, and shows up in the list of audio devices, does not work at all in Accourate on my old machine. Actually, it doesn’t even show up as an option in Asio4all. My usb DAC does show up an multiple new win10 machines but ASIO4all will only let me select 1 device. So I can pick my input device but then when a select my second/output device, the fist one gets unselected.

Maybe the mic cal only shows up once you load a cal curve, because i do not have that option in that menu.

This has taken way too much time, i think I’m going to give up on room correction.

Don’t give up on it. Just find an easier way to get it sorted…

Appreciate this thread is a little old, but I have been using Acourate over the past week and am very impressed by the transformation to my listening experience. There is a learning curve, but once you have some basics in place it is quick to build new filters using different target curves. Uli is very helpful and most efficient to deal with.

I did also use the HAFservice, which is really convenient and gave good results, but I felt I wanted a little more control and the ability to remeasure and rework the filters.

All the best
David

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Wow this one is great to hear https://www.facebook.com/973763699416991/posts/2819751994818143/?d=n hopefully Roon & Dirac are supporting more vendors here soon.

Is Acourate producing a fir filter that can be used in Roon?

Yes @Luca_Alebardi, some of this thread is about people using Acourate generated FIR filters with Roon.

Thanks.
How many filter taps is Acourate able to manage?

“65536 or 131072 samples calculation, filters up to 524288 taps possible”

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