KALMAN RUBINSON Dirac Live 3 ROOM-CORRECTION SOFTWARE

Adoption of DSP-based speaker-and-room correction in home theater—a parallel universe to audiophilia—is almost universal. It’s easy to understand why.

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Home theater matured in the digital age. Its fans were expected to install several loudspeakers in a full-range setup that included at least one speaker—the subwoofer(s)— that functioned exclusively in the problematic bass region. Setup issues were intimidating.

Help quickly came in the form of setup utilities that required no knowledge of acoustics—only a willingness to position a microphone for a series of measurements and let the system do the rest. Audyssey was the first such utility to gain wide acceptance. Today, some arrive installed in AVRs and preamp-processors; others come as standalone devices or computer software. Most work well, providing precise level balance, compensating for unequal path length differences, and correcting in-room frequency response for all the speakers.

In the two-channel world, things have proceeded much more slowly. I can think of several reasons. There are fewer speakers to integrate. Small, stand-mount speakers often benefit from uncorrected room modes to extend their range. Stereo listeners are much more likely to integrate analog sources—turntables, reel-to-reel tape, and old-fashioned radio tuners—into their systems and to resist converting that pure analog signal to digital so that it can be processed and room-corrected. And yet, these days, most two-channel audiophiles spend at least some of their time listening to digital, whether it’s from a streaming service, locally stored downloaded or ripped files, or old-fashioned shiny silver discs. There’s a place in the two-channel world for room-correction DSP.

Dirac Live (the original)