shug4476
Established Member
Having been completely flamed on here for suggesting the heresy that room EQ should form no part of a good music reproduction system, I've managed to try a few different configurations over recent months.
My core system is in my signature. I have had a lot of stereo and multichannel kit through my living room over the last two years but so far, nothing has tempted me to give up the Arcam AV9 (although see below). Some bits of kit did specific things better, but as a marriage of performance, flexibility, and convenience, nothing has quite managed to persuade me to part with it.
My room is a nightmare - lumpy in the bass, very pronounced HF roll off, not great in the mids either. A good candidate for EQ.
I've had no time to run measurements - I did run a load with Audyssey before I listened and I can confirm purely on the basis of the measurements, it works exceptionally well, especially in cleaning up the measured response of a subwoofer.
So here is what I tried:
DIRAC Live - software plugin to JRiver on Macbook Pro, calibrated using Umik-1, digital stream then sent on to Chord 2Qute and analogue output to Arcam AV9 in bypass mode.
ARC - Anthem D2V 3D, which I currently have installed in the room, calibrated using the Anthem ARC Kit, driving the Arcam P7 and the rest of the system normally.
Audyssey XT (non-32 edition) - Denon AVC-A11XVA, fed by a Denon DVD-2930 over Denon Link 3rd. I realise most people now swear by the XT32 edition, however, it was only properly implemented (i.e. put into a pre with excellent analogue engineering) by Denon on two bits of kit (AVC-A1HD and AVP-A1HD) and in the several years I've been looking I think I've only ever seen one that came up with the XT32 upgrade installed. I am just not prepared to try it on the 'cheap and cheerful' receivers Denon chucks out almost every year. I know there are the Marantz dedicated processor designs but they are also adapted AV receivers rather than purpose-built processors with good analogue bypass stages, although I'd probably give one a try.
My Views
To my ears the most transparent and effective of the three was Dirac Live provided the cutoff frequency was set fairly low. As a full-frequency EQ it totally killed the top end and 'air' in the music.
ARC was reasonably effective and did not completely destroy signal fidelity.
Audyssey added a sort of glare/harshness to vocals that was difficult to listen to for extended periods.
However, with straight two channel music, all of the EQ systems were doing (to both my and my wife's ears) significant harm to the signal. I did A/B comparisons on all three sets of kit, with the EQ in and out of the chain, and preferred the EQ off every time. There were no exceptions.
I know some people have horrible rooms, but certainly with two channel music, in all but the most extreme situations, I would urge not bothering with EQ (although I have not tried Room Perfect, it is conceptually the same as all the other systems).
My core system is in my signature. I have had a lot of stereo and multichannel kit through my living room over the last two years but so far, nothing has tempted me to give up the Arcam AV9 (although see below). Some bits of kit did specific things better, but as a marriage of performance, flexibility, and convenience, nothing has quite managed to persuade me to part with it.
My room is a nightmare - lumpy in the bass, very pronounced HF roll off, not great in the mids either. A good candidate for EQ.
I've had no time to run measurements - I did run a load with Audyssey before I listened and I can confirm purely on the basis of the measurements, it works exceptionally well, especially in cleaning up the measured response of a subwoofer.
So here is what I tried:
DIRAC Live - software plugin to JRiver on Macbook Pro, calibrated using Umik-1, digital stream then sent on to Chord 2Qute and analogue output to Arcam AV9 in bypass mode.
ARC - Anthem D2V 3D, which I currently have installed in the room, calibrated using the Anthem ARC Kit, driving the Arcam P7 and the rest of the system normally.
Audyssey XT (non-32 edition) - Denon AVC-A11XVA, fed by a Denon DVD-2930 over Denon Link 3rd. I realise most people now swear by the XT32 edition, however, it was only properly implemented (i.e. put into a pre with excellent analogue engineering) by Denon on two bits of kit (AVC-A1HD and AVP-A1HD) and in the several years I've been looking I think I've only ever seen one that came up with the XT32 upgrade installed. I am just not prepared to try it on the 'cheap and cheerful' receivers Denon chucks out almost every year. I know there are the Marantz dedicated processor designs but they are also adapted AV receivers rather than purpose-built processors with good analogue bypass stages, although I'd probably give one a try.
My Views
To my ears the most transparent and effective of the three was Dirac Live provided the cutoff frequency was set fairly low. As a full-frequency EQ it totally killed the top end and 'air' in the music.
ARC was reasonably effective and did not completely destroy signal fidelity.
Audyssey added a sort of glare/harshness to vocals that was difficult to listen to for extended periods.
However, with straight two channel music, all of the EQ systems were doing (to both my and my wife's ears) significant harm to the signal. I did A/B comparisons on all three sets of kit, with the EQ in and out of the chain, and preferred the EQ off every time. There were no exceptions.
I know some people have horrible rooms, but certainly with two channel music, in all but the most extreme situations, I would urge not bothering with EQ (although I have not tried Room Perfect, it is conceptually the same as all the other systems).